Class j_ 
 
 Book ^_ 
 
 Cop^Ti^htN". 
 
 COn-HIGirr DEPOSIT. 
 
THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 
 OF ROBERT BROWNING 
 
University of Virginia 
 Barbour-Page Foundation 
 
 THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 
 OF ROBERT BROWNING 
 
 FOUR LECTURES 
 
 BY 
 
 THOMAS R. LOUNSBURY,L.H.D,LL.D. 
 
 PROFESSOR EMERITI'S OF ENGLISH IN YALE UNIVERSITY 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 
 
 1911 
 
.L4 
 
 COPYIICHT, 191 1, BY 
 
 CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SON'S 
 Published October, 19 11 
 
 ff 
 
 
THE BARBOUR-PAGE LECTURE 
 FOUNDATION 
 
 The University of Virginia is indebted for 
 the establishment of the Barbour-Page Foun- 
 dation to the wisdom and generosity of Mrs. 
 Thomas Nelson Page, of Washington, D. C. 
 In 1907, Mrs. Page donated to the University 
 the sum of ^^22,000, the annual income of 
 which is to be used in securing each session 
 the delivery before the University of a series 
 of not less than three lectures by some dis- 
 tinguished man of letters or of science. The 
 conditions of the Foundation require that the 
 Barbour-Page lectures for each session be not 
 less than three in number; that they be de- 
 livered by a specialist in some branch of liter- 
 ature, science, or art; that the lecturer present 
 
in the series of lectures some fresh aspect or 
 aspects of the department of thought in which 
 he is a specialist; and that the entire series de- 
 livered each session, taken together, shall pos- 
 sess such unity that they may be published by 
 the Foundation in book form. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I. " Pauline " and " Paracelsus " . . i 
 
 II. " Strafford " and " Sordello " . . 45 
 
 III. " Bells and Pomegranates "... 95 
 
 IV. " Bells and Pomegranates "... 147 
 
 Index 201 
 
"PAULINE" AND "PARACELSUS" 
 
 I purpose in the present course of lectures to 
 give an account of the hterary career of Robert 
 Browning from the pubhcation of his first poem 
 in 1833 to his marriage and departure for Italy 
 in 1846. The story of the works he produced 
 during this period demands, of course, recital; 
 but the principal aim which I have had in view 
 is to bring out distinctly how he struck his con- 
 temporaries; to make clear the causes that trans- 
 formed the cordial welcome he received during 
 the fourth decade of the last century into the in- 
 difference and neglect which waited upon him 
 during the decades immediately following; and, 
 finally, to make manifest the nature of the agen- 
 cies which brought about the remarkable and 
 peculiar revival of his reputation during the clos- 
 ing years of his life. Accordingly, it is his lit- 
 erary career that comes almost exclusively under 
 consideration. Only so far as it bears upon the 
 
THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 
 
 comprehension of that are any records given of 
 his personal life. Most even of this little will be 
 found comprised in the opening lecture. 
 
 Criticism of the work he produced during this 
 period is necessarily involved in any discussion 
 of his career. But there has been no intention 
 to go into it largely, far less exhaustively. About 
 the value or correctness of what of it is here given 
 there will assuredly be difference of opinion. 
 The inferences drawn, the views expressed, are 
 likely to encounter the dissent of many of you, 
 perhaps even of most of you. At all events, I 
 have not needed to come to this university to 
 find those who deem them w-rong and some who 
 call them abominable. The justice of critical 
 conclusions must be left to time to determine, 
 when the likes and dislikes of the present, its 
 fancies and its fashions, have passed out of rec- 
 ognition and almost out of remembrance. 
 
 But though the future can test most satis- 
 factorily the truth of opinion, it is usually at a 
 disadvantage in testing the truth of fact. It is 
 for tlie present to detect and expose falsity of 
 statement, before frequency of repetition has 
 hardened the general mind into settled beliefs 
 which, through laziness or indifference, men re- 
 
OF ROBERT BROWNING 
 
 fuse ever after to discard or even modify. While, 
 therefore, I ask no one to accept the judgments 
 here expressed, I think I may venture to insist 
 that the facts I shall give in controverted matters 
 cannot be successfully disputed. This is a point 
 of some importance, because about certain events 
 in the poet's career there has already begun to 
 gather a mass of mythical statement, v^^hich is 
 found duly recorded in the accounts furnished of 
 his life. It is all the more important to correct 
 it now, because certain of these erroneous as- 
 sertions have for their support the authority of 
 Browning himself. Some explanation of this 
 sort it seemed desirable to premise before enter- 
 ing, as I now do, upon the main subject itself. 
 
 Robert Browning first appeared as an author 
 in the early part of 1833. He was born on May 
 7, 18 12, in Southampton Street, Camberwell, a 
 borough on the southern side of the Thames. 
 Accordingly, at the time of his first venture into 
 literature he had not yet attained his majority. 
 As a general rule, to which there are not many 
 exceptions, poetical genius develops early. Not 
 infrequently, too, it exhausts itself early. Few 
 are the great poets who have reached a rea- 
 
4 THE EARLY LITER^iRY CAREER 
 
 sonably advanced age whose best work has not 
 been composed mainly in the first half of their 
 lives. Their later production shows no advance 
 upon the earlier: more often it indicates distinct 
 retrogression. This is not altogether true of 
 either Browning or Tennyson; but even of them 
 it is in great measure true. 
 
 The boy grew up in a home populous with 
 books; for his father, a clerk in the Bank of 
 England, was in his way a good deal of a scholar. 
 The son, with literary tastes keenly marked, be- 
 gan early to produce poems. These, fortunately 
 perhaps for the peace of our generation, have 
 disappeared. They were largely written under 
 the influence of Byron, who, for the whole period 
 of his literary activity, was what he described 
 himself as being for a while, "the grand Napo- 
 leon of the realms of rhyme." To him all poet- 
 ical aspirants then yielded homage in the form 
 of imitation, conscious or unconscious. 
 
 The father's tastes in literature were in sym- 
 pathy mainly with the old poetic school of the 
 eighteenth century which was dying out, or had 
 already died out, if properly any school can ever 
 be said to die out which has had any real reason 
 for existing at all. Naturally much of the pro- 
 
OF ROBERT BROWNING 
 
 duction of the time which was slowly emerging 
 into public notice, would not be found upon the 
 shelves of his library. In consequence, it was a 
 good deal of a revelation to the boy when he came 
 to know that such a poet as Shelley had even ex- 
 isted. With considerable difficulty he succeeded 
 in procuring most of the dead author's then little 
 read books. The influence of this writer af- 
 fected him profoundly, and, as it seems to me, 
 not altogether happily. It operated to strength- 
 en tendencies and to exaggerate characteristics 
 which, in his case, stood in need of repression and 
 lessening. In particular, the vagueness which 
 pervades much of Shelley's poetry had assuredly 
 no efl^ect in correcting that disposition toward 
 obscurity, not necessarily in his ideas, but in the 
 expression of his ideas, which remained to the 
 last Browning's besetting literary sin. 
 
 It was in the autumn of 1832 while fully under 
 the influence of this author that he composed his 
 first printed work. His father, proud as he was 
 of his son's talents, had no disposition to sink 
 money in the publication of the poem. It is not 
 impossible, brought up as he had been in the old 
 school of versification, that he failed to under- 
 stand it. Nor, in fact, was it then a favorable 
 
6 THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 
 
 time for bringing out poetr}' of any sort what- 
 ever. The great Georgian intellectual outburst 
 had spent itself. It had been followed by one of 
 those regularly recurring periods in the history 
 of literature when the human mind seems for a 
 while to need to lie fallow as a result of previous 
 overproduction. At any rate, the literary palate 
 had lost its relish for the food which it had once 
 eagerly craved, and had not yet found another 
 kind to suit its altered taste. The public had 
 become surfeited with verse. They not merely 
 refused to read it, they refused to buy it. There 
 was this justification for their attitude that most 
 of what then came out was not worth either read- 
 ing or buying. It was frequently assumed and 
 asserted by the professional critics that the day 
 for poetry was past. Accordingly, without the 
 prerequisite of paying for its production, no 
 publisher would think of allowing his name to 
 go upon the title-page of almost any book of 
 verse, least of all upon that of an untried author 
 who was as yet little more than a boy. An aunt 
 of Browning's, however, came forward at this 
 juncture and undertook to bear the expense. 
 Accordingly, early in 1833 a little volume of 
 about seventy pages made its appearance, bear- 
 
OF ROBERT BROWNING 
 
 ing the imprint of Saunders, Otley & Co., a 
 firm in Conduit Street. It was entitled, "Paul- 
 ine, or the Fragment of a Confession." 
 
 The poem contained over a thousand lines of 
 blank verse, fully as mystical as any and a 
 good deal more mystical than much that Brown- 
 ing subsequently wrote. It was anonymous 
 and the secret of its authorship was long main- 
 tained. A copy of this original edition is now 
 one of the rarest of volumes. In 1890 it was 
 said that only five were known to exist; and it is 
 still safe to assert that the pretty thorough search 
 which has gone on since that time has not suc- 
 ceeded in tripling the number. Accordingly, 
 when one does appear in the market it com- 
 mands a price absurdly disproportionate to its 
 actual value. In January, 1896, a copy contain- 
 ing on the fly-leaf some observations upon the 
 poem by the poet himself was sold by auction 
 and brought the comfortable sum of one hun- 
 dred and forty-five pounds. It is mainly those 
 who never read poetry that can afford to pay 
 such prices for it. 
 
 Browning, who at this period combined with 
 the dove-like guilelessness of youth something 
 of the craft of the serpent, paved the way him- 
 
rHE EARLY UTFJiARY CAREER 
 
 self for one fairly favorable notice of the coming 
 book. William Johnson Fox, preacher, orator, 
 and essayist, was then a potent power in a not in- 
 considerable section of the literary world. He 
 was at that time the editor of The Monthly Re- 
 positoryy a Unitarian periodical, which he was 
 tr}ing to divest of its theological character and 
 replace by one more distinctly literary and politi- 
 cal. To him Browning, while still a boy, had 
 been introduced by a female friend named Eliza 
 Flower. She was the elder of rsvo sisters, one of 
 whom, more easily recognized by her married 
 name of Sarah Flower Adams, is well known to 
 the religious world by her hymn beginning 
 "Nearer, My God, to Thee." Eliza Flower 
 was a musician, and attained no mean reputa- 
 tion as a composer of music. With this refined 
 and highly gifted woman, nine years his senior, 
 the youthful Browning did the wisest and most 
 creditable thing he could do as a boy by falling 
 in love. She died at a comparatively early age; 
 but to the last day of his life the poet cherished 
 her memory with peculiar tenderness. To Fox, 
 Eliza Flower had shown a collection of short 
 poems written by her boy-admirer when he was 
 about twelve. To it he had given the name of 
 
OF ROBERT BROWNING 
 
 Incondita — a title which he might appropriately 
 have applied to a good deal of his later work. 
 The critic did not recommend these pieces for 
 publication, but he recognized in their writer the 
 possession of unquestionable poetic power. The 
 manuscript containing them was entirely de- 
 stroyed. Much to the grief of his partisans, the 
 copy made by Miss Flower shared the same fate 
 at the hands of the poet, when later in life it came 
 into his possession. 
 
 Browning, now about to make his first venture 
 in print, bethought him of the kindly critic of 
 his unpublished early verse. Accordingly he 
 sent him a letter signed with his initials announc- 
 ing the coming appearance of his poem. It is 
 printed in full by one of his biographers, and 
 though it has been long before the public no one 
 of his admirers seems to be conscious of the fact 
 that never was there a more transparent attempt 
 to secure, under the guise of humility, a favor- 
 able review. "Perhaps," wrote he, "by the aid 
 of the subjoined initials and a little reflection 
 you may recollect an oddish sort of boy who had 
 the honor of being introduced to you at Hackney 
 some years back — at that time a sayer of verse 
 and a doer of it, and whose doing you had a little 
 
THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 
 
 previously commended after a fashion — (whether 
 in earnest or not, God knows): that individual it 
 is who takes the liberty of addressing one whose 
 slight commendation then was more thought of 
 than all the gun, drum, and trumpet of praise 
 would be now, and to submit to you a free and 
 easy sort of thing which he wrote some months 
 ago *on one leg' and which comes out this week 
 — having either heard or dreamed that you con- 
 tribute to The Westminster. Should it be found 
 too insignificant for cutting up, I shall no less 
 remain, dear sir. Your most obedient servant, 
 R. B." 
 
 This must be considered, if we take the youth 
 of the writer into account, a most skilful device 
 for securing a review of one's work which even 
 if not favorable would not be hostile. A delight- 
 ful boyishness pervades the whole letter. There 
 is the affected depreciation of the poem itself as 
 a free and easy thing written hastily. Better 
 still is that appreciation of the commendation 
 bestowed by the critic upon the verses produced 
 at that earlier period of life when such praise was 
 worth more to him than thunders of applause 
 would be at the time of writing, now that he had 
 readied, it may be added, his present advanced 
 
OF ROBERT BROWNING n 
 
 age of nearly twenty-one. Nor is there any lack 
 of skOl displayed in the suggestion that the book 
 would furnish materials for cutting up in The 
 fVcstmtnster Review. 
 
 The appeal to Fox was successful. It was not, 
 however, in The IVestminster that his notice of 
 the poem appeared, but in The Monthly Reposi- 
 tory for April. There he welcomed the work 
 with a warm and unquestionably sincere eulo- 
 gium. In it he gave distinct expression to his 
 belief that a writer had come who was entitled to 
 be called a poet. He had previously reviewed the 
 volume of 1833 of the then little-known Tennyson 
 with a good deal of enthusiasm. One sentence 
 of this article on " Pauline " is indeed remarkable 
 for its early reference to the two great poets of 
 the Victorian era. "We felt certain of Tenny- 
 son," he wrote, "before we saw the book by a 
 few verses which had struggled into a newspaper; 
 we are not the less certain of the author of 
 'Pauline.'" All of us are wise after the event. 
 Rarely has it been given to one man to foresee 
 and predict the future glory of two great writers 
 of widely diverse gifts, who were then either 
 not known at all or known only to limited circles 
 made up largely of personal friends. 
 
THE EARLY LITER.ARY CAREER 
 
 The social and literary influence of Fox was 
 then great. It unquestionablv had the effect of 
 procuring for the young and unknown author a 
 favorable hearing in quarters which otherwise 
 would in all probability have paid little heed to 
 his production. Here it is desirable to give a 
 brief account of a certain class of critical period- 
 icals, which, well known as they soon came to be, 
 were then just beginning to influence or direct 
 public opinion; for it was about this period that 
 the weekly had begun to displace the quarterly 
 and the monthly from the supreme position which 
 these had long held as arbiters of literary merit. 
 These weeklies were then, as now, of t^vo classes: 
 the purely literary and the combined literary and 
 political. Five of them occupied at that time 
 a specially prominent position. The oldest of 
 them belonged to the second class. It was The 
 Examiner, which had been established in 1 808 
 by John and Leigh Hunt, and was now under 
 the control of the noted journalist, Albany Fon- 
 blanque. With him came to be associated in this 
 fourth decade of the century John Forster as lit- 
 erary and dramatic critic. Its main rivals were 
 The Spectator and The Atlas. The oldest of the 
 other class was The Literary Gazette^ which had 
 
OF ROBERT RBOWNING 13 
 
 been founded in 18 16. At that time it still re- 
 tained its lead in the general popular estimate; 
 but its influence was steadily lessening before that 
 of its rival, TJie Athenceum, which had been 
 established in 1828. 
 
 From some of these critical periodicals the 
 poem received favorable mention. This was 
 noticeably true of The Atlas and The Athencvum. 
 The article in the former concluded, indeed, with 
 the declaration that the work had created in the 
 reviewer's mind just so much interest that he 
 would be induced to look with curiosity to the 
 author's next essay. The Athenccum was, if 
 anything, even more cordial. It quoted pas- 
 sages from the poem. Still it is evident that the 
 critic saw that for the work as a whole there 
 would be little recognition. In truth, his clos- 
 ing words gave one further example of the uni- 
 versal despondency which had at that time over- 
 taken the English race as to the future of the 
 highest form of literature. "The day is past," 
 he said mournfully, "for either fee or fame in the 
 service of the muse; but to one who sings so 
 naturally, poetry must be as easy as music to 
 the bird, and no doubt it has a solace all its 
 own." 
 
14 THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 
 
 But it must not be supposed that the three 
 periodicals whose opinions have been quoted 
 represent the universal attitude. "Somewhat 
 mystical," ran the criticism in The Literary 
 Gazette, "somewhat poetical, somewhat sensual, 
 and not a little unintelligible — this is a dreamy 
 volume without an object and unfit for publica- 
 tion." Even more concisely was the poem de- 
 scribed in Taifs Edinburgh Magazine, the organ 
 of the Northern Whigs. It is there simply men- 
 tioned as "a piece of pure bewilderment." It 
 was this brief and contemptuous notice that fore- 
 stalled and prevented the publication in the 
 magazine of the review of the poem which John 
 Stuart Mill had prepared for this periodical. 
 But the remark that Mill made on the margin of 
 the book came a few years after to Browning's 
 knowledge , and filled him with just pleasure. 
 "Is there not somewhere," he wrote to Miss 
 Barrett, in February, 1845, "the ^^"^^ book I first 
 printed when a boy, with John Mill, the meta- 
 physical head, his marginal note that 'the writer 
 possesses a deeper self-consciousness than I ever 
 knew in a sane human being.' " ^ 
 
 ^"Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett," New 
 York, 1899, vol. I, p. 28. 
 
OF ROBERT RROWNING 15 
 
 The point of view, however, is everything. 
 Sanity was the one thing found lacking by the 
 reviewer in Eraser's Magazine, the London organ 
 of the Tories. That periodical was then bring- 
 ing out a series of critical articles entitled, " Poets 
 of the Day." These articles were somewhat 
 contemptuously headed Batch the First, Batch 
 the Second, and so on, as the numbers succes- 
 sively appeared. In spite of the not altogether 
 respectful heading, it is right to remark that the 
 notices were occasionally of a laudatory char- 
 acter. In the number for December, 1833, 
 "Pauline" received attention. The review opens 
 with a citation of the Latin quotation which 
 Browning had placed at the beginning of his 
 book. '' Non duhito quin titulus, etc.," it said, 
 "quotes the author of 'Pauline' from Cornelius 
 Agrippa; which we, shearing the sentence of 
 its lengthy continuation, translate thus: we are 
 under no kind of doubt about the title to be given 
 to you, my poet, you being, beyond all question, 
 as mad as Cassandra, without any of the power 
 to prophesy like her or to construct a connected 
 sentence like anybody else." The article went 
 on to designate him as the Mad Poet of the Batch; 
 as being mad not in one direction only but in all. 
 
1 6 THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 
 
 But no review, whether friendly or hostile, 
 could have then or did have the slightest in- 
 fluence upon the sale of "Pauhne." None at 
 any rate could have saved the work from obliv- 
 ion, if left to itself. The poet, toward the close 
 of his life, when Browning societies were in the 
 heyday of their vigor and were scattering his 
 name far and wide, came seemingly to be rather 
 proud of the ill success which according to him 
 had attended his two earliest ventures into 
 poetry. He exaggerated, perhaps unconsciously, 
 the disfavor with which they had been received. 
 Of this work in particular he represented it as 
 being the completest of failures from the point of 
 view of sale. "I willingly repeat," said he in a 
 letter of 1886, "that to the best of my belief no 
 single copy of the original edition of * Pauline' 
 found a buyer; the book was undoubtedly still- 
 born — and that despite the kindly offices of many 
 friends who did their best to bring about a suc- 
 cessful birth." ^ Certainly the fact of his ever 
 having written such a poem soon passed away 
 almost entirely from the memory of men. One 
 reason for this was doubtless that he himself 
 
 ' "Letters from Robert Browning to Various Correspondents," 
 edited by T. J. Wise, London, privately printed, 1896, vol. II, p. 58. 
 
OF ROBERT BROWNING 17 
 
 came to have an unfavorable opinion of it. He 
 therefore largely kept to himself the secret of its 
 existence and authorship. 
 
 In the course of his intimacy, however, with 
 the woman he was soon to call his wife he had 
 come to disclose the facts. In January, 1846, 
 Miss Barrett wrote to him that she was anxious 
 to have the poem, in fact determined to have it 
 in a day or two. "Must you see 'Pauline'?" 
 he asked almost plaintively. If so, he begged 
 her to wait a few days till he could correct the 
 misprints in it and write its history. It was so 
 evident, indeed, that he was reluctant to have her 
 see it at all that a little later she is found priding 
 herself upon her virtue in not sending for it to 
 the booksellers, before she knew positively 
 whether he would much dislike to have her read 
 it. Browning continued to protest. The poem, 
 he said, was altogether foolish, and it was not 
 boy-like, and he had rather she saw real infantine 
 efforts — verses at six years old, drawings still 
 earlier — anything but this ambiguous, feverish 
 production. But the thought of her buying it 
 at a bookseller's amused him. " I smile in glori- 
 ous security," he wrote, — "having a whole bale 
 of sheets at the house-top. He never knew my 
 
i8 THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 
 
 name even and I withdrew them after a little 
 while." ^ The outcome of it all was that Miss 
 Barrett had to content herself with a promise that 
 she should see the work some day. 
 
 "Pauline" in fact was so thoroughly forgotten 
 that for two decades it was hardly mentioned by 
 any one in connection with Browning's name. 
 Some twenty years after its publication Dante 
 Gabriel Rossetti, then a young poet and painter, 
 came across a copy of it in the library of the Brit- 
 ish Museum. He was profoundly struck by it. 
 Furthermore, so confident was he that no one but 
 the author of "Paracelsus" could have been its 
 author that he wrote to ask Browning, who was 
 then in Florence, if this were not the case. In 
 his letter he stated that as the poem was not 
 otherwise procurable he had copied the whole of 
 it with his own hand. Browning returned an 
 affirmative answer. This seems to have been 
 the first discovery of the book and the poet's first 
 acknowledgment of its authorship to any outside 
 of his immediate circle. It was not included 
 among his collected works until the edition of 
 1868. In a brief preface to it then he declared 
 
 ' "Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett," New 
 York, 1899, vol. I, pp. 386, 390, 400. 
 
OF ROBERT BROWNING 19 
 
 that he retained it with extreme repugnance. 
 It was nothing, he said, but a matter of necessity 
 that led him to reprint it. He knew that copies 
 of it were in existence; that sooner or later it 
 was the intention to have it republished. So 
 he sought to forestall any action of the sort by 
 correcting some misprints — not a single syllable 
 had been changed, he asserted — and by intro- 
 ducing it with an exculpatory word. "The 
 thing," he wrote, "was my earliest attempt at 
 'poetry, always dramatic in principle, and so 
 many utterances of so many imaginary persons, 
 not mine,' which I have since written according 
 to a scheme less extravagant and scale less im- 
 practicable than were ventured upon in this crude 
 preliminary sketch." This accords with the in- 
 scription written as early as 1838 in the volume 
 which has been already noted as commanding 
 the price of over seven hundred dollars. 
 
 Before taking into consideration his next work, 
 it is desirable to give a brief outline of Browning's 
 personal history up to the time of his first anony- 
 mous publication. His education, outside of the 
 private instruction he received and of the attend- 
 ance upon certain schools in the vicinity, was 
 limited to a short course of study at University 
 
THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 
 
 College, in Gower Street. His name appears on 
 the registrar's books for the opening session of 
 1829-30. But he did not remain long. Italy, 
 he was wont to say, was his university. It was 
 certainly one of the best schools in which to pur- 
 sue later study. It is more than doubtful if it 
 was an advantageous one for a beginner possessed 
 of his mental characteristics. There are many 
 other kinds of education besides that furnished 
 by the university, and some for some persons far 
 better. For Browning I doubt if any would 
 have been as good, and his failure to receive it 
 will, it is to be feared, have in the long run a 
 damaging effect upon his reputation. His writ- 
 ings show throughout the lack of that final re- 
 sult of thorough training, the ability of the com- 
 municator of ideas to put himself in the position 
 of the recipient. 
 
 This was clearly a defect that belonged to 
 Browning by nature. In consequence it never 
 could have been fully supplied. Still some of its 
 worst results could and would have been largely 
 corrected by severe intellectual drill. That 
 would never have added to his greatness as a 
 poet in those bursts of inspiration in which the 
 poet is at his highest. It would never have given 
 
OF ROBERT BROWNING 21 
 
 Strength to his pinions for a loftier flight. But 
 no writer, however eminent, Hves constantly, or 
 even for any length of time^ in a state of exalta- 
 tion. Upon those lower levels on which the 
 mind habitually moves, the rigid intellectual 
 training of the university would have given 
 clearness to expression, it would in particular 
 have prevented resort to the startling abruptness 
 of transition which causes the existence of those 
 perplexing puzzles, those complicated knots of 
 meaning which it is now the delight of the dis- 
 ciple to unravel or to fancy that he has un- 
 ravelled. 
 
 In the long run these intricacies and ambigui- 
 ties of expression are certain to affect Browning's 
 reputation injuriously. Indeed, there need be 
 no hesitation in saying that from the very outset 
 they have so affected it. But they will affect it 
 far more in the future. When contemporary in- 
 terest has disappeared, it is the artistic perfection 
 of a work that will recommend it to the great 
 body of readers. What is bizarre, what is gro- 
 tesque, what is unnecessarily obscure will then 
 find few apologists and fewer admirers. In our 
 literature there is a marked illustration of this 
 truth in the case of Donne. He was in his time, 
 
22 THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 
 
 as Ben Jonson expressed it, the great lord of 
 wit. So far as intellectual power is concerned, 
 he could hardly reckon a superior among his 
 contemporaries. He still retains a band of de- 
 voted admirers, and to me as one of the number 
 he seems well worthy of the admiration they be- 
 stow. But he will always be caviare to the 
 general. The crabbed diction, the rugged 
 rhymes, the inharmonious versification, the ob- 
 scure phraseology, all these frequently recurring 
 as they do would continue to repel the multitude 
 from attempting to crack the kernel of a nut even 
 were it to contain meat more delicious than that 
 which Donne's own writings afford. 
 
 Two years after came Browning's first ap- 
 pearance in literature under his own name. 
 This was then and for a long time following 
 usually regarded as his first actual appearance. 
 It was in the summer of 1835 that his poem 
 came out entitled "Paracelsus." The composi- 
 tion of it had taken up a large share of the pre- 
 ceding winter. To the subject he was led by his 
 fondness for out-of-the-way learning and by his 
 interest in mediaevalism and mysticism which 
 was, or had become a part of his nature. The 
 life of the hero of the piece, who has been vari- 
 
OF ROBERT BROWNING 23 
 
 ously viewed as an adventurous quack and as a 
 great pioneer in medical discovery, had been 
 suggested to him by a foreign friend, Comte de 
 Rupert-Montclar, to whom the finished work 
 was dedicated. But on reflection the suggest- 
 tion had been withdrawn by its maker. There 
 was no opportunity to introduce the subject of 
 love, and upon love, the Frenchman sagely re- 
 marked, every young man has, of course, some- 
 thing new to say. Browning apparently had 
 nothing new to say. But he was not deterred 
 from the project by this fact. He decided to 
 take the life of Paracelsus as his subject and to 
 treat it in his own way. 
 
 The poem was finished in March, 1835. The 
 difl&culty was then to find a publisher. To 
 Moxon all aspiring unknown poets applied, be- 
 cause he had written poetry himself. Accord- 
 ingly, to Moxon Browning went first. That 
 publisher declined even inspecting the manu- 
 script. There was no money in verse, he de- 
 clared, and he felt that he had done his share in 
 bringing out unprofitable ventures of that sort. 
 After trying one or two other firms to no effect, the 
 poem was finally taken by Effingham Wilson, the 
 same man who brought out Tennyson's volume 
 
24 THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 
 
 of 1830. It was clearly not sought for eagerly 
 by him, for it was Browning's father who paid 
 the expense of the publication. It can be 
 added that his father never got his money back 
 from the proceeds of the sale. This, though not 
 in the least surprising to the students of the liter- 
 ary history of the period, seems to surprise some 
 of the poet's biographers profoundly. 
 1^ Butthough "Paracelsus"wasnota work which 
 paid the expense of publication, its appearance 
 announced, to all who had eyes to see, the coming 
 of a great original poet. The form into which it 
 was cast partook of the dramatic. It was divided 
 into acts corresponding to five successive epochs 
 in the life of its hero. Conversation or rather 
 discourse goes on between the few personages 
 that appear. But in no proper sense of that 
 word is the poem a drama, nor did Browning so 
 intend it. He took care, indeed, to guard against 
 any such misinterpretation of it, though some of 
 his later disciples have either been ignorant of 
 his caution or have chosen to ignore it. In the 
 preface to the original edition he gave full recog- 
 nition to the fact that the work did not conform 
 to the canons of stage representation and that it 
 had not been prepared with that object in view. 
 
OF ROBERT BROWNING 25 
 
 "I have endeavored," he said, ''to v^rite a poem 
 and not a drama." It is as a poem alone there- 
 fore that it is entitled to be judged. 
 
 Whether the picture given of the character of 
 Paracelsus be true or no does not strictly 
 enter into the discussion of the literary merits of 
 the work. Certain it is, hov^ever, that the por- 
 trayal has profoundly affected the opinion enter- 
 tained in these latter days of the man portrayed; 
 and if there has been a revolution of sentiment 
 in his favor, to this one poem probably more than 
 to any other single cause may be attributed the 
 change, at least in the English-speaking world. 
 It is noticeable that Browning subsequently fell 
 into the error, pardonable, perhaps, at the time, 
 of deriving our English word "bombast" from 
 the name of the hero of the piece. This in full 
 was Phillipus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombas- 
 tus von Hohenheim. "'Bombast,' his proper 
 name," he wrote, "probably acquired from the 
 characteristic phraseology of his lectures that 
 unlucky significance which it has since retained." 
 The student of English etymology, much hard- 
 ened to derivations of this sort, scarcely needs to 
 be told that "bombast," like the corresponding 
 "fustian," is a word derived from late Latin 
 
2 6 THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 
 
 through the Old French and designates strictly 
 a kind of coarse cotton cloth which from its use 
 in stuffing and padding clothes came to adopt 
 the transferred sense of swollen or inflated lan- 
 guage. 
 
 "Paracelsus" was really the first, as it has re- 
 mained, one of the finest of a long series of stud- 
 ies in character and sensation in which Browning 
 was to exhibit peculiar excellence. There is not 
 here the time nor is this the place to give a full 
 account of the poem. A most marked attribute 
 of it is the high intellectual character accorded to 
 the hero, the original loftiness of his aims, his 
 aspirations for a success too great for mortal to 
 achieve, with his disdain of the helps by which 
 mortals attain to whatever success they achieve, 
 the inevitable reaction and degradation that fol- 
 low failure, and the final purification that comes 
 from trial and sorrow and suffering. Paracel- 
 sus learns after long experience the lesson that 
 the pursuit of knowledge pure and simple, while 
 setting little store on the element of human sym- 
 pathy and love, furnishes a barren harvest even 
 from the point of view of knowledge itself. To 
 him, as to inferior men, as he looks back upon a 
 career of effort which has been wasted and at- 
 
OF ROBERT BROWNING 27 
 
 tempts which have miscarried, comes that de- 
 spondency which haunts the heart of even those 
 seemingly the most fortunate. It is life's ever- 
 recurring tragedy of faith that has failed, of ex- 
 pectation that has been disappointed, and of as- 
 piration that has died, which finds expression in 
 the inquiry which sooner or later every thought- 
 ful man puts to himself as he compares what is 
 with what was desired or hoped to be — Is this 
 all ? Is this what I have longed for, struggled 
 for, dreamed of as worthy of being accomplished ? 
 Such is the inquiry which Paracelsus directs 
 to his own heart. In the moment of highest ap- 
 parent success he does not hide his deep discon- 
 tent with life. He had failed. He was miser- 
 able. Yet to the outside world he had at the very 
 time reached the summit of human achievement. 
 His name was in every one's mouth. His lect- 
 ures were thronged by listening crowds who 
 hung upon his words, treasured his sayings, wor- 
 shipped his person. Even the chosen friend of 
 his youth who had sought to dissuade him from 
 the career he had marked out for himself, who 
 had forewarned him of failure, is imposed upon 
 by this universal acclaim which hails him as the 
 miracle of men, the deliverer of the race from 
 
2 8 THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 
 
 the bondage of antiquated dogma and belief. 
 Not so Paracelsus himself. He recognizes the 
 unsubstantiality of the basis upon which his rep- 
 utation rests. Not in the least blinded by the 
 glitter of present approval, he perceives plainly 
 that the hour of his degradation is on its way, 
 and he confesses the moral failure which fore- 
 shadows the coming of the personal one. The 
 general declension in the aims of Paracelsus, the 
 substitution of inferior motives for the lofty ones 
 by which he had originally been actuated, is typi- 
 fied in the beautiful lyric in the fourth act begin- 
 ning with the line, 
 
 " Over the seas our galley went " 
 
 So much for the character of the work; it re- 
 mains to consider its reception by the public. 
 The present age which has been fertile in myth- 
 ical stories about Browning's early career, has 
 more than once loudly proclaimed that " Paracel- 
 sus" was received by the public unfavorably: 
 perhaps with even less favor than was "Paul- 
 ine"; that in truth it was a failure. If by failure 
 is meant that it had no large sale, the assertion 
 may be conceded to be perfectly true. But in 
 such a fact there was at that time nothing excep- 
 
OF ROBERT BROWNING 29 
 
 tional. During the decade in which it made its 
 appearance no poem or volume of poems pos- 
 sessed of distinct literary quality had a large sale. 
 This was true even of the "Philip Van Artevelde" 
 of Henry Taylor, which came out in May, 1834. 
 That work, the most successful of all the works 
 of high grade produced during the period in 
 question, hardly more than paid the expense of 
 its production, if, indeed, it can be said to have 
 done as much as that. If at any time during 
 the nineteenth century the profession of poet 
 deserved Milton's characterization of it as "the 
 homely slighted shepherd's trade," it was during 
 its fourth decade. 
 
 But in every other respect, save that of sale, 
 "Paracelsus" was the most unqualified of suc- 
 cesses. It gave its author at once a recognized 
 position in the world of letters. It brought him 
 the acquaintance and regard of many men of 
 conspicuous eminence in various fields of intel- 
 lectual activity. With some it gave, birth to in- 
 timate friendship. The authorship of "Paul- 
 ine" was known to but few. Accordingly by 
 most readers this second poem was believed to be 
 his earliest work. More and more, as time went 
 on, this continued to be the impression. By all 
 
3° 
 
 THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 
 
 men possessed of keen critical discernment 
 ''Paracelsus," as the first production of a man 
 who had not yet reached his twenty-third birth- 
 day, was looked upon as giving promise of a brill- 
 iant future. Defects it admittedly had; but in 
 their eyes these were far more than counterbal- 
 anced by its merits. The feeling about the 
 greatness of the work grew as time went on and 
 men had had sufficient leisure to become fully 
 acquainted with it. No one who makes himself 
 familiar with much of the contemporary com- 
 ment about the man and the book can hardly 
 help discovering the steadily growing recognition 
 of Browning's genius and the glowing anticipa- 
 tions that were then entertained of the loftiness 
 of the achievements he was to accomplish. For 
 example, two anonymous sonnets addressed "to 
 ,the author of 'Paracelsus,'" which appeared in 
 «x^ the New Monthly Magazine for September, 
 1836, give full expression to the belief in his 
 future greatness which even at that early period 
 many had come to cherish. 
 
 It is all the more desirable to bring out dis- 
 tinctly the contemporary success of "Paracel- 
 sus," in the highest sense of the word success, 
 because Browning himself was in a measure re- 
 
OF ROBERT BROWNING 31 
 
 sponsible for the contrary belief. In his later 
 years one gets the impression that he was almost 
 as eager to underrate the good fortune of his 
 first poems as he was to contradict the reports 
 of the ill fortune of his plays, A disposition 
 of this sort showed itself at a somewhat early 
 period. Late in 1845 he wrote to the woman he 
 was soon to wed that as compared with the brill- 
 iant success of Talfourd's "Ion," his "Paracel- 
 sus" had been a dead failure. There was no 
 real justification for a comparison of this sort. 
 The circumstances attending the publication of 
 the two poems were essentially different. Tal- 
 fourd's name had been long before the public. 
 He had appeared as an author before Browning 
 was born. He had been a frequent contributor 
 to periodical literature, he had made for himself 
 a reputation at the bar. His tragedy of "Ion," 
 previously printed for private circulation, had 
 been produced in May, 1836. Largely through 
 the acting of Macready it had gained a success 
 on the stage, which had aroused a corresponding 
 curiosity among readers. The feeling was nat- 
 urally reflected in the sale of the work in a pub- 
 lished form. In this same letter Browning went 
 on to say that until Forster's notice in The Ex- 
 
32 THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 
 
 aminer every journalist that thought it worth 
 while to allude to his poem treated it with entire 
 contempt, beginning with The Athenceum. Out 
 of a long string of notices which his publisher re- 
 ceived, each one vied with its predecessor in ex- 
 pressing disgust at his ''rubbish," until some- 
 thing of a change was effected by the article in 
 The Examiner just mentioned. 
 
 The ignorance, however great, of one man can 
 not well be deemed sufficient to counterbalance 
 the knowledge, however slight, of another man. 
 It would therefore be presumptuous in me to call 
 in question the accuracy of these assertions of 
 Browning, because diligent search has not en- 
 abled me to find anywhere anything to justify 
 them. Unquestionably the earliest notices of 
 his poem in the leading critical authorities were 
 wholly inadequate. The limited time they 
 took for examination could not at best have kept 
 them from being otherwise than unsatisfactory. 
 ''Paracelsus" was formally published on Satur- 
 day, the fifteenth of August. On that very day 
 two reviews of it appeared — one in The Spectator 
 and one in TJie Atlas. Just a week later came 
 out the notice in The Athenceum.i Had the 
 writers of these articles been adequate to the task 
 
OF ROBERT BROWNING 
 
 33 
 
 to which they set themselves or to which they 
 were set, they could not on the spur of the mo- 
 ment have produced anything worthy of con- 
 sideration. Still, however futile their criticisms 
 were, they were neither vituperative nor con- 
 temptuous. The review in The Spectator, which 
 was a column long, and silly, and the review in 
 The Athenccum, which was only two sentences 
 long, but just as silly, though they were unfavor- 
 able, contained nothing abusive. In fact, all 
 these earliest notices of the poem acknowledged 
 the ability of the author. The Atlas, while^,-- 
 deeming it unsatisfactory as a whole, declared 
 that its writer possessed powers far above the 
 ordinary level and eloquence of no common 
 order. It cited passages from it solely on ac- 
 count of their beauty. 
 
 Even The Atheijccum, which Browning mis- 
 takenly assumed to have been the first to review 
 " Paracelsus, "did not deny its merit. The critic 
 conceded that there was talent in the poem, 
 though it was dreamy and obscure — leaving us 
 in doubt whether the critic deemed the poem 
 dreamy and obscure or the talent. Somewhat 
 similar observations, the result of glancing at the 
 production and not really reading it, occur oc- 
 
34 THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 
 
 casionally even later. "There are many touches 
 of beauty, almost Shakespearian, in the work," 
 wrote the reviewer in The Metropolitan Magazine 
 for October; "but its general tone is homely and 
 its contents crude. It is a poem ambitiously un- 
 popular." But while notices of this sort are 
 found, especially before men had had time to read 
 it and study it, there is nowhere any display of a 
 contemptuous attitude in any organ of criticism of 
 the highest grade, whatever there may have been 
 elsewhere. Several of them — like The Literary 
 Gazette^ for instance — did not notice it at all. 
 But Browning's assertion that the poem was 
 laughed to scorn and was denounced as rubbish 
 until the appearance of Forster's article receives 
 no support from the reviews found in the then 
 most authoritative guides of public opinion. 
 The general attitude taken by the critics, with 
 their hesitating and contradictory pronounce- 
 ments, is more accurately set forth by Fox in his 
 article on the poem which appeared about two 
 months after its publication. "Their verdict," 
 he wrote, "is already given in favor of its being 
 a work of genius or else a worthless abortion — 
 the world may find out which; and when the 
 world has found it out, the critics will discover 
 
OF ROBERT BROWNING 
 
 35 
 
 the reasons and set them forth in learned disser- 
 tations." * 
 
 Further, if Forster's review established a bar- 
 rier sufficient to withstand the raving, roaring 
 tide of detraction which had set in against the 
 poem, the inundation of disparagement could 
 hardly have assumed an overwhelming character 
 by the time he had erected it. " Paracelsus" ap- 
 peared, as we have seen, in the middle of August, 
 1835. Forster's review was pubHshed in The 
 Examiner for September 6. Consequently, two 
 or three weeks at farthest is all the time that op- 
 probrium had to exercise its devastating effect 
 before Forster's review checked its further dem- 
 onstration. This article indeed is credited by 
 Browning himself and by his biographers with 
 an almost astounding influence upon public 
 opinion. It turns up with regularity in about 
 every account of the poet's career which sets 
 out to record the reception of this poem. "The 
 great event in the history of ' Paracelsus,' " says 
 Mrs. Orr, "was John Forster's article in The 
 Examiner.'' A statement to the same effect 
 is made in the "Personalia" of Mr. Gosse. 
 "The Examiner," writes he, "contained a re- 
 view of the poem at great length in which 
 
 * The Monthly Repository, November, 1835. 
 
36 THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 
 
 full justice was done to Mr. Browning's gen- 
 ius." "The Examiner" says Mr. Sharp, "ac- 
 knowledged it to be a work of unequivocal 
 power and predicted for its author a brilliant 
 career." 
 
 Undoubtedly Forster's article up to the date 
 of its appearance was far the most outspoken 
 in the praise which it gave. It must have been 
 all the more grateful to the author, because 
 at that time neither he nor his critic had any 
 knowledge of each other. It was not, indeed, 
 till late in the following December that they met. 
 But the review itself never had the influence 
 which Browning's friendship for its writer at- 
 tributed to it, and which later his biographers 
 have conceded to it on his authority. It was 
 merely one of several agencies — the greatest of 
 which was time — that were working in favor of 
 the production. The article in question took up 
 three columns o^ The Examiner. Much of it con- 
 sisted of extracts from the poem itself, amount- 
 ing in all to about one hundred and sixty lines. 
 Nor was it unmixed laudation. It conceded 
 that some of the passages were tedious and some 
 were obscure. But upon the work as a whole it 
 bestowed the highest praise. "Since the publi- 
 cation of 'Philip Van Artevelde,'" began the 
 
OF ROBERT BROWNING 37 
 
 review, "we have met with no such evidence of 
 poetical genius and of general intellectual power 
 as are contained in this volume." The tone of 
 what followed coincided with the opening. " It 
 is some time since we read a work of more un- 
 equivocal power than this," were the words of its 
 closing passage. *'We conclude that its author 
 is a young man, as we do not recollect his having 
 published before. If so, we may safely predict 
 for him a brilliant career, if he continues true to 
 the present promise of his genius. He possesses 
 all the elements of a fine poet." 
 
 This is cordial and, what is better, well-de- 
 served praise. But to one familiar with the criti- 
 cal literature of all time, and in particular the 
 critical literature of that time, it is far from being 
 unexampled. Essentially the same words were 
 then used in influential journals of works of 
 which now the literary antiquary alone knows. 
 But Forster's convictions, like those of many 
 others, were fortified by further familiarity with 
 the poem; and it is not unreasonable to suppose 
 that the article of the critic which Browning 
 came later to have in mind was not the one which 
 appeared in TJiq Examiner, but the long one of 
 twenty pages which about eight moiuhs after- 
 
38 THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 
 
 ward came out in Colburn's New Monthly Maga- 
 zine. ' It was professedly the first number — 
 to which no second ever succeeded — of an article 
 entitled "Evidences of a New Genius for Dra- 
 matic Poetry." The evidence of this genius, it 
 asserted, was the little and scantily noticed vol- 
 ume of "Paracelsus." 1 he authorship of the 
 review was not given, hut was probably well 
 known. 1 here was no imcertainty in the utter- 
 ance. "Without the slightest hesitation," wrote 
 Forster, "we name Mr. Robert Browning at once 
 with Shelley, Coleridge, Wordsworth. He has 
 entitled himself to a place among the acknowl- 
 edged poets of the age." 
 
 The criticism was certainly as cordial as it 
 was true. Put long before this article appeared, 
 heartiest eulogiums had been passed upon the 
 work. Fox, to whom it had been shown in 
 manuscript, was not behindhand in acknowl- 
 edgment both of its promise and performance. 
 In Tltr Monthly Repository of November, 1835, 
 he gave the fullest expression to his admiration. 
 His testimony, sincere as it evidently was, may 
 be thought to have been influenced by a desire 
 to stand up \'or one of his own contributors; for 
 
 ■ For Mairli, 1S3O, vol. XXXVI, p. 288, 
 
OF ROBERT BROWNING 
 
 39 
 
 during that year and the preceding, Browning 
 had pubUshed in this periodical several pieces of 
 poetry. But no bias from this source can be 
 thought to have influenced Leigh Hunt, who in 
 this same month of November gave up nine col- 
 umns of his 'Journal to a review of the poem, 
 supplemented by copious extracts. 
 
 There can be no question that this article was 
 the work of the editor himself. "Paracelsus" 
 was highly praised in it, and, what is better, 
 was sensibly praised. Furthermore, the review, 
 friendly as it assuredly was, is particularly worthy 
 of attention for the note of warning it contained 
 as to the danger the author was exposed to of al- 
 lowing his peculiarities of style to degenerate into 
 a slovenly mannerism. Two sentences of it, it 
 may be well to quote, not merely for the general 
 truth they convey, but for the value of their 
 special application. "We do not object," wrote 
 Hunt, "to his long and often somewhat intri- 
 cately involved sentences, or to forms of phrase- 
 ology and construction of occasional occurrence, 
 which are apt for the moment to perplex and 
 startle at the first reading; or to any other devia- 
 tions of a similar kind from ordinary usage or the 
 beaten highway presented by our books of author- 
 
40 THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 
 
 ity on grammar, rhetoric or prosody, in so far 
 as such unusual forms are the natural and un- 
 affected product of the writer's genius working 
 its purposes in its own way. Such distinctive 
 characteristics, when we have become familiar 
 with them, and they have lost any slight repul- 
 siveness with which they may at first have acted 
 upon us, even acquire a power of enhancing the 
 pleasure we receive from a composition other- 
 wise eminently beautiful, and of riveting our love 
 for it." What Hunt deprecated was the indul- 
 gence in these peculiarities of expression when 
 there was nothing to justify them. These words, 
 it seems to me, set forth adequately the varying 
 effects of Browning's poetry. When his genius 
 is at its loftiest, the peculiarities of expression 
 enhance the attractiveness of the composition 
 and give it increased hold upon our feelings. 
 But there was always the tendency to resort to 
 these peculiarities when there was nothing in the 
 matter to sustain their weight. Consequently, 
 when they were not a positive excellence, they 
 tended to degenerate into a mere trick of expres- 
 sion; and trickery in poetry — I do not use trick- 
 ery in a bad sense — carries with it in the end its 
 own death-warrant. 
 
OF ROBERT BROWNING 41 
 
 "Paracelsus" was not indeed a work to take 
 the public by storm. ;\For its appreciation it re- 
 quired close reading and reflection. It would 
 have been no wonder, therefore, if the weekly 
 purveyors of hasty criticism had sniffled at it 
 hesitatingly or sneered at it contemptuously, 
 though with opinions of this latter sort it has not 
 been my fortune to meet. Most frequently, so 
 far as I have observed, they took the safe course 
 of noticing it in that perfunctory way which is 
 adopted by the writer who seeks not so much to 
 conceal his opinions as to conceal the fact that he 
 has no opinions. But the more fully men con- 
 sider all great work the more fully does its great- 
 ness grow upon them. It was so in the case of 
 "Paracelsus." As time went on, the notices the 
 poem received prove conclusively the increas- 
 ing hold it was gaining over the most thoughtful 
 class of readers. No adventitious helping hand 
 brought this about; it was its own inherent worth. 
 I have already asserted that Forster's criticism 
 never had the influence upon public opinion 
 which Browning's friendship for the critic led 
 him to attribute to it. In the very month of 
 March in which his second and really enthusi- 
 astic article appeared in the New Monthly Maga- 
 
42 THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 
 
 zine, and consequently not afFected by it, came 
 out a long, elaborate, and cordial review of ** Par- 
 acelsus" in the then far more influential Eraser's 
 MagazinCy under the title of "Asinarii Scenici" * 
 1 he poem was not only praised in the highest 
 terms, but its superiority to Taylor's "Philip 
 Van Artevelde" was distinctly and even some- 
 what aggressively proclaimed; and "Philip Van 
 Artevelde" was the one work of that decade 
 which in general critical estimate had attained 
 highest repute. 
 
 I am not picturing the success of "Paracel- 
 sus" as being in the slightest degree overwhelm- 
 ing; but so far as it went the success was un- 
 equivocal. To this there is further evidence 
 which can hardly be gainsaid. In 1842 Richard 
 TIengist 1 lorne contributed to a quarterly period- 
 ical an article on Browning's poetry. " Its value 
 as a truthful record of the reception accorded to 
 this particular production is founded on the fact 
 that the review was submitted in manuscript to 
 the poet himself. Naturally, 1 lorne, like most 
 men of that time, looked upon "Paracelsus" as 
 
 » Vol. XI IT. p. 362. 
 
 • Church of England Quarterly Review, October, 1842, vol. XII, 
 p. 46.t. 
 
OF ROBERT BROWNING 43 
 
 his earliest work. He discoursed upon the suc- 
 cess which had attended this supposedly first vent- 
 ure. The restrained way in which he expresses 
 himself is evidence that he had no disposition 
 to exaggerate or lessen the nature or degree of the 
 welcome which had waited upon the young poet. 
 "His reception," wrote Hornc, "was compara- 
 tively good; we may say very good. Several of 
 those periodicals, in which the critics seem dis- 
 posed to regard poetry of a superior kind as a 
 thing to be respected and studied, hailed the ap- 
 pearance of Mr. Robert Browning with all the 
 honors which can reasonably be expected to be 
 awarded to a new-comer, who is moreover alive. 
 In more than one quarter the young poet was 
 fairly crowned. Ihe less intelligent class of 
 critics spoke of him with praise; guarding their 
 expressions with an eye to retreat, if necessary, 
 at any future time, made various extracts, and 
 set him to grow." 
 
 1 he passages just cited from a notice which 
 had passed before its publication under the eye 
 of Browning himself give a view of the recep- 
 tion of his work a good deal different from that 
 for which in certain instances the poet was later 
 responsible. There can be no question as to its 
 
44 ROBERT BROWNING 
 
 correctness. No volume of verse — not even ex- 
 cepting "Philip Van Artevelde" — v^as published 
 during the fourth decade of the nineteenth cen- 
 tury which created a profounder impression than 
 did " Paracelsus" upon that body of men who are 
 indeed limited in number, but whose verdict is 
 the verdict which posterity never undertakes to 
 set aside. It led no slight proportion of the 
 choicest spirits of the time to display at even 
 this early period in his career warmest recog- 
 nition of what he had already accomplished and 
 to look with hope and expectation upon what 
 was reserved for him to achieve in the future. 
 It is all-important to bring out this fact sharply, 
 because it serves to explain the disappointment 
 with which high-wrought anticipation came to 
 regard the works of his which immediately suc- 
 ceeded, the retrogression that took place in the 
 estimate which had begun to be entertained of 
 him by the public, and the long period of neglect 
 that was to follow. 
 
II 
 
 "STRAFFORD" AND "SORDELLO" 
 
 Among the men who had been attracted to 
 Browning by his "Paracelsus" was the famous 
 actor Macready. He was introduced to its 
 author at the house of Fox, late in November, 
 1835. Under date of December 7, he records in 
 his diary that he had read this work. He was 
 profoundly impressed by it. There were oc- 
 casional obscurities, he conceded; but these 
 were more than atoned for by the poetry of 
 thought, feeling, and diction which pervaded it. 
 **The writer," he added, "can scarcely fail to be 
 a leading spirit of his time." Subsequent pe- 
 rusal strengthened the first conviction. It ** raises 
 my wonder the more I read it," he remarked in 
 an entry of several months later. 
 
 The acquaintance thus begun soon ripened in- 
 to close friendship. From this time on, up to 
 the estrangement which in 1843 attended the pro- 
 duction of "A Blot i' the 'Scutcheon," a good 
 deal of our knowledge of Browning's doings 
 
 45 
 
46 THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 
 
 come from the references to him in the actor's 
 diary. The intimacy that sprang up directed 
 to the drama the attention of the young poet. 
 Under date of February i6, 1836, Macready re- 
 cords that he was visited by Browning in com- 
 pany with Forster. They had come to talk with 
 him over the plot of a play which the former had 
 in mind. The poet told the actor that he had 
 been hit by his performance of Othello, and the 
 actor told the poet that he hoped that blood 
 would come. The subject Browning was then 
 contemplating was Narses, the famous general 
 of Justinian. But this he gave up. On August 
 3, of this same year, Macready tells us that Fors- 
 ter had informed him that Browning had settled 
 upon Strafford. The subject chosen pleased 
 him. "He could not have hit upon one," he 
 wrote in his diary, **that I could more readily 
 have concurred in." 
 
 It is altogether probable — in fact, it may be 
 said to be certain — that Browning's choice of 
 this subject was suggested by the aid he had 
 been led to give to his friend Forster in his life of 
 Strafford. At that time a series of independent 
 works were coming out under the general eitle of 
 "The Cabinet Cyclopaedia." For this series 
 
OF ROBERT BROWNING 47 
 
 Forster had agreed to write biographies of several 
 of the statesmen connected with the great Puri- 
 tan revolution of the seventeenth century. He 
 had already completed the life of Sir John Eliot 
 which made up the first part of one of the 
 contemplated volumes. In it he had again 
 shown his zeal for his friend. In the text he 
 quoted three or four lines of verse. They were 
 taken, he said, from "the poet whose genius 
 has just risen amongst us." Then a note was 
 appended clearly for the purpose of celebrating 
 the writer of the extract. After giving the name 
 of the author of "Paracelsus" as the poet al- 
 luded to, he went on to say that "there would 
 be little danger in predicting that this writer 
 will soon be acknowledged as a first-rate poet. 
 He has already proved himself one." ^ 
 
 The life of Eliot with that of Strafford was to 
 constitute a single volume. For this second 
 biography Forster had already made a collection 
 of materials and had begun its composition. 
 Then he fell ill. The book had been promised 
 for a certain date; to finish it at the time spec- 
 ified was impracticable. Naturally Forster was 
 in a despondent state of mind. In this condition 
 
 * "Eminent British Statesmen," vol. II, p. 104, London, 1836. 
 
48 TITR EARLY LITERARY CAREER 
 
 Browning found him. He came at once to the 
 rescue of his friend and volunteered to do the 
 work. The offer was accepted. Browning ac- 
 cordingly took the materials which Forster had 
 gathered together and proceeded to complete the 
 life. In 1836 the volume containing the two 
 biographies appeared, but with no hint that 
 any one save he whose name was on the title- 
 page had anything whatever to do with the 
 production of the second one. 
 
 The secret of Browning's share in the prepar- 
 ation of the biography was not revealed until 
 some years after its supposedly sole author was 
 dead. The Browning Society came upon it in 
 the course of their probings into all the mysteries 
 connected with the poet's career. In 1892 it 
 brought out that part of the volume which con- 
 tained the life of Strafford as being mainly the 
 composition of the poet. The facts which have 
 just been given have been largely taken from the 
 preface to this reprint. These have been ques- 
 tioned by some; by others they have been strenu- 
 ously denied. Precisely how much of the com- 
 position of the work was Browning's own may 
 never be exactly ascertained. But that he had 
 nothing to do with it requires ignorance to assert 
 
OF ROBERT BROWNING 49 
 
 or to accept. Internal evidence is sufficient of 
 itself to make clear his participation in the un- 
 dertaking. But with this we do not have to con- 
 tent ourselves. Those who deny the poet any 
 share in the production must be prepared to at- 
 tack his veracity. Clearly it was a belief of his 
 own that he had a good deal to do with it. Such 
 was the impression he conveyed to his future 
 wife as the correspondence between them proves 
 conclusively.* 
 
 Having chosen Strafford as the subject of his 
 drama, Browning worked at it diligently. Be- 
 fore the close of the year 1836 he had finished it 
 and given it to Macrcady. At first the actor was 
 disposed to look with distinct favor upon the 
 play. His own attitude of approval extended to 
 Osbaldistone, the manager of the theater, to 
 whom it was read on March 30, 1837. lie was 
 willing to produce it without delay. The ex- 
 pectations of its continuous popularity that pre- 
 vailed can be inferred from the terms he offered. 
 He agreed "to give the author £\2 per night for 
 twenty-five nights, and £\o per night for ten 
 
 ' Sec in particular in tlic rorrcspondcnrc of Browning anrl Miss 
 Barrett the letter of Miss Barrett dated May 36, 1846, vol. II, 
 p. 183; of May 30, ill., p. lyo, and of June 6, //)., p. 284. 
 
50 rilE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 
 
 nights beyond." So far everything was favor- 
 able. But the more Macready studied the play, 
 the less confidence he felt in its excellence for 
 stage representation. It became clear to him, 
 as time w^ent on, that nothing could save it but 
 the acting. That this might possibly carry it to 
 the end without disapprobation was the far from 
 glowing anticipation of success he set down in 
 his diary before the piece was performed. In the 
 comments he made there upon the play he in- 
 cidentally brings out with distinctness the funda- 
 mental difference between the methods adopted 
 by Browning and the treatment of a similar sub- 
 ject for stage purposes by the supreme English 
 dramatist. "In all the historical plays of 
 Shakespeare," he observes, "the great poet has 
 only introduced such events as act on the indi- 
 viduals concerned, and of which they are them- 
 selves a part; the persons are all in direct relation 
 to each other, and the facts are present to the 
 audience. But in Browning's play we have a 
 long scene of passion — upon what .? A plan des- 
 troyed, by whom or for what we know not, and 
 a parliament dissolved, which merely seems to 
 inconvenience Strafford in his arrangements." * 
 
 ' Diary, April 28, 1837. 
 
OF ROBERT BROWNING 
 
 SI 
 
 Macready's fears were realized. Only the 
 acting could save it, he thought, and the acting 
 did not save it. The characters of Strafford and 
 Lady Carlisle w^ere taken respectively by him and 
 Helen Faucit. The combination of these two, 
 it might seem, would suffice to score a triumph 
 for almost any play. Without their support 
 "Strafford" would assuredly have been the com- 
 pletest of failures. But even with their support 
 it was far from being a success. It was chosen 
 by Macready for his benefit, and naturally there 
 was that night a full house. He seems to have 
 made the most that could be made of his part. 
 Browning himself was more than satisfied. He 
 assured the actor after the rehearsal that it was 
 to him "a full recompense for having written the 
 play, inasmuch as he had seen his utmost hopes 
 of character perfectly embodied." ' 
 
 It was well that the poet had this feeling; for 
 it was the principal recompense he received. 
 The twenty-five nights of performances, for 
 which the manager had agreed to pay twelve 
 pounds each, dwindled to a mere fraction of the 
 hoped-for number. At the end of the fifth per- 
 formance the play was withdrawn. The osten- 
 
 ' Macready's Diary, May i, 1837. 
 
52 THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 
 
 siblc reason given was the secession of Vanden- 
 hofFwho took the part of Pym. Manifestly this 
 was but a pretext. It is idle to maintain that the 
 withdrawal of a single minor actor, however 
 important, could have led to the removal from 
 the boards of a play, for the continuance of which 
 there was a demand on the part of the public; 
 especially as another stood ready at the time to 
 take his place. 
 
 The little success of the piece Browning at a 
 later period ascribed to the poor performance of 
 the minor actors. On this point there was the 
 usual diversity of views expressed at the time. 
 It is clear that for these subordinates — most of 
 whom held respectable, even if not high position, 
 on the stage — the play had not the slightest in- 
 terest. It could hardly be expected therefore 
 that they could make it interesting to others. 
 The view taken of them by Browning does not 
 seem to be different from that of several con- 
 temporary critics wlio, while praising unreserv- 
 edly Macready and Helen Faucit, speak of the 
 performance of some of the other actors as 
 wretched, where it was not abominable. Forster 
 especially raged furiously in TJie Examiner. * 
 
 »No. 1527, p. 294, May 7, 1837. 
 
OF ROBERT BROWNING 53 
 
 "Mr. Vandcnhoff," he wrote, "was particularly 
 nauseous with his whining, drawling, and slouch- 
 ing in Pyin; and Mr. Webster whimpered in 
 somewhat too juvenile a fashion through Young 
 Vane, Some one should have stepped out from 
 the pit and thrust Mr. Dale from the stage." 
 This last-named actor was the one who took the 
 part of the king. Hiere is assuredly no cpiestion 
 that drastic treatment of the kind reconunended 
 in his case would have added to the interest of 
 the particular performance, whatever might have 
 been its effect upon the permanent fortunes of 
 the play. 
 
 Forster was indeed the one leading critic who 
 remained faithful to this drama while it was alive 
 and praised it after it was dead. "Strafford" 
 he said in TJic Examiner of the week following, 
 "was winning its way into greater success than 
 we had hoped for it, bu«- Mr. Vandenhoff's seces- 
 sion from the stage has caused its temporary 
 withdrawal. It will be only temporary, we trust; 
 no less in justice to the great genius of the author 
 than to the fervid applause with which its last 
 performance was received by an admirably filled 
 house." His opinion of the favor it had won 
 could hardly have been that of those who, out- 
 
54 THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 
 
 side of the author, were most interested in its 
 success. Macready's view of the situation we 
 have no means of knov/ing definitely; for be- 
 yond the record of its initial performance, no 
 later reference to the play, no criticism of it, 
 has been permitted to appear in his diary as 
 published. But his real opinion of it can be in- 
 ferred from his action. He made no attempt to 
 revive it that season, as Forster had hoped, 
 though his then intimate friendship with the 
 author would have led him to take such a course, 
 had he shared in the sentiments of the critic about 
 its prospects of success. The temporary with- 
 drawal of "Strafford" became, indeed, eternal. 
 During his many years of acting that followed, 
 Macready never brought it again upon the stage. 
 All contemporary accounts are practically 
 unanimous in the view that "Strafford" was a 
 failure. Even Forster, who put the best possible 
 face upon the matter, conceded that it would not 
 take permanent hold upon the stage. It is idle 
 to pretend that this agreement of opinion was due 
 to any hostility on the part of the critics. So 
 little was there of this feeling that almost every- 
 where a genuine desire existed that the play 
 should succeed. There is in truth a tone of re- 
 
OF ROBERT BROWNING 55 
 
 gretful disappointment in several of the notices 
 which it received. The critics came prepared to 
 praise; they wanted to praise; nothing but their 
 greater or less conscientiousness stood in the way 
 of their praising. This desire of seeing the 
 tragedy successful was mainly due to the steadily 
 growing partiality in Browning's favor which had 
 been produced by ''Paracelsus" upon the more 
 cultivated class of minds. No one can read 
 many of the contemporary notices of the per- 
 formance of " Strafford" without becoming aware 
 of how high was the anticipation of it raised by 
 the previous work, and how keen was the dis- 
 appointm.ent that its author had in this later one 
 failed to come up to the expectation entertained. 
 The conviction, however, was general that in- 
 stead of showing an advance in achievement it 
 indicated decided retrogression. 
 
 There is an account of the performance of the 
 opening night in the autobiography of the con- 
 temporary artist and poet, William Bell Scott. 
 It occurs incidentally in his mention of Leigh 
 Hunt. "On the first interview, I think, it was," 
 he wrote, "he told me of Browning's play of 
 'Strafford' being placed on the stage. This was 
 on the first of May, 1837. My admiration for 
 
56 THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 
 
 * Paracelsus' was so great I determined to go and 
 applaud without rhyme or reason; and so I did, 
 in front of the pit. From the first scene it be- 
 came plain that applause was not the order. 
 The speakers had every one of them orations 
 to deliver, and no action of any kind to perform. 
 The scene changed, another door opened, and 
 another half-dozen gentlemen entered as long- 
 winded as the last. Still, I kept applauding with 
 some few others, till the howling was too over- 
 powering and the disturbance so considerable 
 that for a few minutes I lost my hat. The truth 
 was that the talk was too much the same and 
 too much in quantity; it was no use continuing 
 to hope something would turn up to surprise the 
 house." ' 
 
 Apparently this is an exaggerated account of 
 the ill success which attended the performance of 
 the play on the opening night. But the motives 
 given by the writer for going is another of the 
 many proofs of the high position which his pre- 
 vious work had already given Browning. It 
 shows, too, how much that poem had done and 
 was doing for his reputation that the play of 
 **StrafFord" was published before it was performed 
 
 ' William Bell Scott's "Autobiographic Notes," vol. I, p. 124. 
 
OF ROBERT BROWNING 57 
 
 as being "by the author of 'Paracelsus.'" It 
 came out at the end of April. Furthermore, it 
 was thought worthy of being made the subject 
 of a generally favorable criticism in the Edin- 
 burgh Review. To us at this day the article 
 which then appeared furnishes somewhat amus- 
 ing reading, for it attributes to alterations made 
 by Macready, and not to the poet himself, the 
 abrupt transitions, the disjointed sentences, the 
 conveyance of meaning by starts and jerks, 
 which we all recognize now as peculiar character- 
 istics of Browning's style. But the very fact 
 that the Scottish quarterly thought it worth while 
 to review the drama meant then a great deal 
 more than we conceive of now. That stately 
 periodical, though shorn of much of its influence, 
 still retained something of the glamour of its 
 original dignity. It occasionally took up some 
 really or presumably inferior work for the sake 
 of scoring it; but in the way of praise, it had too 
 much regard for its position to take serious notice 
 of any new writer who w^as not regarded as of 
 great promise or of any work which was not in 
 some way deemed of distinct importance. It 
 was years after this before it condescended to re- 
 view Tennyson at all. Even then the writer of 
 
58 THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 
 
 the article was cautioned against going so far as 
 to commit the periodical by the bestowal of too 
 much praise. 
 
 It is to be kept in mind that we have been dis- 
 cussing the play here not as a specimen of Eng- 
 lish literature, but as a contribution to the acting 
 drama. Yet in the former capacity it is no more 
 a success than it was in the latter. On the stage, 
 Macready and Helen Faucit could not keep it 
 from being a failure. It is equally a failure in 
 the closet. As the men concerned in the per- 
 formance of it did not find it interesting, so did 
 not those who set out to read it. The inability 
 has continued. The enjoyment of its perusal is 
 confined mainly to those devotees of the poet 
 whose cardinal principle is apparently to admire 
 that portion of his production which the rest of 
 the world deems unendurable. Men read it 
 now, so far as they read it at all, from a sense 
 of duty; they do not read it for pleasure. The 
 main difficulty with it is its utter lack of interest. 
 We care little for the characters in the tragedy or 
 the fate that befalls them. Several of them are 
 little more than lay-figures with names attached 
 to them; and one could frequently be substi- 
 tuted for the other and neither hearer nor reader 
 
OF ROBERT BROWNING 59 
 
 would be conscious of any impropriety. Straf- 
 ford's devotion to the king who deserts him ex- 
 cites Httle respect. In one of his character it 
 lacks dignity; for it is not the attitude of a man 
 which is portrayed, but that of a woman whose 
 conduct is under the control of her feelings. The 
 love part furnished by Lady Carlisle is insignifi- 
 cant; but insignificant as it is, it is too much. It 
 appeals as little to the audience to whom it is re- 
 vealed as it does to the one person of the drama 
 from whom it is carefully kept; and so long as 
 it is kept from him, it had no business to be in 
 the play at all. 
 
 " Strafford" has, however, a certain importance 
 in Browning's literary career, not because of the 
 importance it has in itself, but because it marks 
 his entrance into dramatic composition. The 
 plays he wrote during his life were seven. From 
 the number specified are intentionally excluded 
 "Pippa Passes" and "In a Balcony," which are 
 dramatic dialogues and not dramas proper. All 
 of these seven belong to the earlier period of his 
 career which is here under consideration; only 
 three of them have ever been brought out upon 
 the regular stage. Accordingly it may be well to 
 consider at this point the poet's position as a 
 
6o THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 
 
 dramatist. For his rank in that class the most 
 extravagant claims have been advanced, espe- 
 cially of late years. More than once v^e have 
 been assured that he is the greatest of English 
 dramatists since Shakespeare. However opin- 
 ions may differ on that point, all will agree 
 that there is one respect in which his fortunes 
 bear no striking resemblance to those of the great 
 Elizabethan. Contemporary evidence is ample 
 to show that Shakespeare was the most popular 
 playwright of his time. His plays held the stage 
 then; they have continued to hold it ever since. 
 
 The modern advocates of Browning as a great 
 dramatic poet do not venture to maintain that 
 either of these facts is true of the plays of his 
 that have been produced on the stage. Instead 
 they content themselves with insisting that on 
 their first representation they did as well as the 
 average; that it was due to unforeseen and un- 
 expected agencies that they did not gain at the 
 time the full meed of popular favor; and, further- 
 more, the reports that they actually failed were 
 and are malicious misstatements. They have 
 this justification for what they say of this sort 
 that the belief they express is based largely upon 
 utterances of Browning himself, when in later 
 
(;/'■ ROBERT BROWNING 6i 
 
 life a treacherous memory led him to put forth 
 some remarkable statements about his plays, 
 which bear but a remote resemblance to the 
 truth. But even were we to concede the correct- 
 ness of the attempts to explain the lack of success 
 of these pieces in the past, they do not account for 
 the fact that they do not hold the stage in the 
 present, and that they give no sign of holding it 
 in the future. They may be acted at intervals. 
 Through adventitious circumstances they may 
 occasionally perhaps meet with a sort of quali- 
 fied favor. But no popular demand exists for 
 them. When announced the interest they arouse 
 is that of curiosity or partisanship. This is 
 amply sufficient to explain whatever success 
 Helen Faucit had with "Colombe's Birthday," in 
 1853, or Lawrence Barrett with *'A Blot i' the 
 'Scutcheon," in the season of 1884-85. 
 
 The truth is that so far from being a great 
 dramatist, second only to Shakespeare, Browning, 
 in the proper sense of the word, is no dramatist at 
 all. No great poet who has set out to write plays 
 has failed more signally than he in mastering the 
 technique of the art. None has shown so little 
 comprehension of those details of expression, 
 construction, and arrangement which unite to 
 
62 THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 
 
 make a play successful on the stage. Nor was 
 he in the shghtest degree incHned to defer to the 
 opinions of those who knew from practical ex- 
 perience the methods best calculated to appeal 
 to an audience. His dramas throughout exhibit 
 vital defects as acting plays. They lack organic 
 unity and order, and what we may call inevitable 
 development. What is further unsatisfactory in 
 them is the utter inadequacy of their portrayal 
 of human nature, and too frequently their un- 
 faithfulness to it. But, so far as the average 
 theater-goer is concerned, worse than anything 
 else, is their lack of sustained interest. Power- 
 ful passages appear in them; but no play can be 
 kept alive merely by powerful passages. Above 
 all, so far as regards representation, the impos- 
 sibility of comprehending the conversation and 
 consequently of following the course of what little 
 action there is, without effort which must occa- 
 sionally be almost agonizing in its intensity, — 
 this of itself will always make them failures up- 
 on the stage. 
 
 I am doing no injustice to Browning in say- 
 ing — for more than once he practically intimated 
 it himself — that in his writing he went upon the 
 theory that the reader has no rights which the 
 
OF ROBERT BROWNING 63 
 
 author is bound to respect. It was the business 
 of the former to comprehend. No duty rested 
 upon the latter to make himself comprehensible, 
 at least easily comprehensible. This naturally 
 did not lead to his ready or cordial acceptance by 
 the public. But if such was his attitude toward 
 the reader, who has leisure to turn back, to com- 
 pare and to reflect, we can imagine what would 
 be the result in the case of the hearer who must 
 catch at once the meaning of what is uttered, 
 whose attention must be so constantly directed 
 to what is said and done at the moment that 
 neither time nor opportunity is afforded to con- 
 sider what has gone before. There is, indeed, 
 no great play in which at the first hearing, as at 
 the first reading, something will not be found to 
 have escaped the attention of the most observant. 
 There will be sentences of which he will not 
 get the exact purport. But in the case of the 
 genuine dramatist these occasional failures to 
 comprehend the full meaning of particular lines 
 do not interfere with the comprehension of the 
 work as a whole or even of any of its details. 
 The broad general effects will be as perceptible at 
 the first hearing as they will be at the hundredth. 
 That this should be so is a necessary require- 
 
64 THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 
 
 ment for success. But so little was this elemen- 
 tary consideration heeded by Browning, so little 
 did he try to conform to it, that often a new sen- 
 tence demanded the attention of the hearer be- 
 fore he had fully mastered the purport of the one 
 it succeeded. To such an extent was this car- 
 ried that one of the critics of the first perform- 
 ance of " Strafford,'* who though not favorable 
 was by no means disposed to be censorious, 
 discovered, as he tells us, that "the best way of 
 obtaining an impression of what was going on 
 was to take care not to follow the speech too 
 closely, but to hear the opening of a sentence 
 and supply the remainder by imagination." * 
 
 It is no marvel therefore that Browning's plays 
 did not succeed. They are often hard to follow 
 in the closet; on the stage it is impossible to fol- 
 low them. The truth is that his forte did not lie 
 at all in the drama. It is in dramatic monologue 
 alone that he achieved success. In that he has 
 no superior in our literature; we may almost say 
 he has no equal. But the dramatic monologue 
 is only allied to the drama; it is not the drama 
 itself. It is confined to the revelation exhibited 
 in pure soliloquy, or to soliloquy broken only by 
 
 ^ Atliourunt, May (>, i8_^7, p. 331. 
 
OF ROBERT BROWNING 65 
 
 occasional interrogation. Without speaking of 
 any otlur of its various failures to meet the re- 
 quirements of stage representation, it excludes 
 action entirely. Hut action is a cardinal dis- 
 tinction of the drama proper: it is essential to its 
 very existence. Herein Browning failed com- 
 pletely. The characters in his plays are as a 
 rule so much taken up with talking ahout every- 
 thing in general that they have hardly leisure left 
 to do anything in particular. They discuss their 
 feelings instead of being inspired by them; and 
 in discussing them they forget the hearer who is 
 waiting for something to hajipen. Fhe born 
 dramatist, like the orator, has his eye always up- 
 on the audience. This was the particular class 
 of persons from whom Browning kept his eyes 
 steadily averted. His plays therefore are to be 
 read and studied; they are not to be witnessed. 
 Not one of them complies with the canons of 
 effective stage representation. In order to rank 
 him in this class of writers, his partisans have to 
 invent a distinction between dramatic authors 
 and playwrights which seems based upon the 
 theory that a genuine dramatic author can not 
 produce a play which an ordinary audience can 
 endure. 
 
66 THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 
 
 But the belief that Browning is a great drama- 
 tist, that it is a distinct mark of highest cultiva- 
 tion to enjoy the performance of his plays has 
 now become with many a faith which must be 
 lived for, and if necessary be died for. The in- 
 tensity of this feeling can be gaged by the fact 
 that it sometimes survives the actual experience 
 of seeing them acted. It is the proud boast of 
 his extremest partisans that his dramatic writ- 
 ings do not appeal to the multitude. Hence, 
 there is little opportunity for even the elect to 
 witness their representation save by being per- 
 mitted to share in the intellectual feasts of this 
 sort which are occasionally provided in the pri- 
 vate retreats of his special admirers. At times 
 in our lives most of us are called upon to partici- 
 pate in gatherings of various kinds whose pro- 
 fessed aim is to improve the individual and to 
 elevate humanity as a whole. Very rarely do 
 such gatherings conduce to hilarity. But among 
 the countless entertainments of this sort which 
 are apparently devised to impart additional 
 gloom to life, there seems to me nothing quite 
 so depressing as the performance of a Browning 
 play by amateurs. Actor and auditor alike come 
 to the sacrifice weighed down with a sense of re- 
 
OF ROBERT BROWNING 67 
 
 sponsibility for the success of this mission of do- 
 ing and suffering. Especially on the faces of the 
 hearers assembled can be seen that look of min- 
 gled resolution and resignation which almost 
 defiantly proclaims the fixed determination, 
 come what may, to be uplifted and inspired. 
 True it is, frivolous and light-minded persons 
 may be found who attend merely to see and to be 
 seen. But the frivolity and gayety of these in- 
 truders make no head-way against the all-per- 
 vading seriousness of those who have assembled 
 to bear aloft the gonfalon of culture pure and un- 
 defiled. The most scoffing spectator comes 
 soon to feel that he is assisting at a solemn rite, in 
 which the hierophants interpret to the worship- 
 pers the message to his generation — to use the 
 now conventional phrase — which Browning has 
 delivered. It is fair to say, however, that the 
 ceremonial, dispiriting as it may be, is attended 
 with none of the repulsive features which are apt 
 to characterize all other forms of human sacri- 
 fice; for the victims not only welcome their 
 martyrdom but are transported with the joy of 
 being immolated. The chastened but exalted 
 mood in which they receive the message may 
 perhaps be best indicated in the words of a fern- 
 
68 THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 
 
 inine enthusiast, who, in a burst of confidence 
 after one of these trying ordeals, said to me as a 
 supposed devotee, "If we did not know how 
 splendid this whole thing is, what a horrible bore 
 we should think it to be." 
 
 To mark distinctly the contrast between a great 
 poet and a great poet who is also a great play- 
 wright, nothing can be supplied more convincing 
 than a comparison of "Luria" with "Othello" 
 Nothing more clearly reveals the limitations of 
 the modern author and his lack of insight into 
 the nature of successful stage representation. 
 In writing this tragedy, Browning had before his 
 eyes the corresponding work of Shakespeare. 
 His Luria, as he phrased it himself, belongs to 
 Othello's country. The leading characters of 
 both plays are Moors — Moors, too, of highest 
 intellectual and moral endowment, simple- 
 hearted, unskilled in craft, doing everything in 
 honor. Both, too, are in the service of Italian 
 states. Both finally commit suicide. There 
 the resemblance ceases between the plays. In 
 the one action hurries on from beginning to end; 
 in the other action stands still while declamation 
 rages unchecked. Out of several characteristics of 
 "Luria,"one may be worth pointing out because 
 
OF ROBERT BROWNING 69 
 
 it vitally concerns the interest of the play for rep- 
 resentation before an English audience. Hardly 
 a personage in it contents himself with making a 
 serious speech of less than a dozen lines, while 
 most of them need three or four times that num- 
 ber to express themselves satisfactorily. The 
 play accordingly is not made up of dialogues but 
 of a succession of monologues. 
 
 The lack of the instinct for dramatic propriety 
 reaches, however, far deeper than neglect of 
 characteristics which go to render a play success- 
 ful upon the stage. Othello is acted upon by in- 
 fluences we all recognize; he exhibits feelings 
 with which we all sympathize, and the deed 
 which ends his life is to us a natural solution of 
 the difficulties into which he has been betrayed. 
 In Browning's play it requires protracted thought 
 to perceive any reason for the behavior of the 
 characters; and Luria himself finally commits 
 suicide without other justification for so doing 
 save that he, while acting with perfect loyalty, 
 is distrusted by the city which employs him. 
 Browning's future wife, whose critical acumen 
 was as much superior to her husband's as her 
 creative power was inferior, naturally objected 
 to this way of disposing of the protagonist of his 
 
70 THE EARLY LITER^iRY CAREER 
 
 drama. It struck her as ignoble and unheroical. 
 It is curious to read Browning's own explanation 
 of the reasons that led him to resort to the cheap 
 expedient of suicide — a device, it may be added, 
 to which he was always too much addicted for 
 getting rid of his characters. It was a very just 
 objection which Macready made to the ending 
 of "A Blot i' the 'Scutcheon." "Observe only," 
 the poet wrote, "that Luria would stand, if I 
 have plied him effectually with adverse influ- 
 ences, in such a position as to render any other 
 end impossible without hurt to Florence, which 
 his religion is to avoid inflicting — passively 
 awaiting, for instance, the sentence and punish- 
 ment to come at night, would as surely inflict it 
 as taking part with her foes. His aim is to pre- 
 vent the harm she will do herself by striking him, 
 so he moves aside from the blow." 
 
 Contrast Luria's motives for the final act as 
 set forth by Browning with those indicated by 
 the great dramatist for a similar ending. In the 
 case of Othello, there is scarcely anything else 
 left for him to do. His life has centred itself 
 in his love for Desdemona. The belief in her 
 revolt, which his simple nature has been worked 
 upon to accept, causes him to care no more for 
 
OF ROBERT BROWNING yi 
 
 what has been to him life's supremest joy. The 
 supposed knowledge of her unfaithfulness leads 
 him to destroy the one being whom he finds out 
 too late to have been his own in thought and 
 heart and deed. When he comes to learn the 
 real truth, it is not loss of honor which afflicts 
 him; it is not the attitude of Venice toward 
 himself that disturbs him. It is that through 
 his own credulous and unreasoning suspicion 
 everything has gone which for him has made life 
 worth living. To take himself out of it seems 
 the natural and only solution of the difficulties 
 with which he finds himself environed, the only 
 mode of relief from the agony he endures, the 
 only possible expiation he can make for the crime 
 he has committed. We are therefore not as- 
 tounded by his act because daily we see similar 
 conditions followed by the same result. 
 
 But in the case of Luria, the reason given for 
 suicide is more than inadequate; it is almost en- 
 titled to be termed ridiculous. Why does he 
 destroy himself.? He has served the state with 
 absolute fidelity. Though watched by its jeal- 
 ous spies, he has resisted all inducements to 
 avenge himself for the imputations cast upon 
 his loyalty and honor. Yet his devotion can not 
 
72 THE EARLY LITEIbiRY CAREER 
 
 ward off the desire to strike him, if it can ward 
 off the attempt itself. So, as Browning expresses 
 it, he moves aside from the blow. The moving 
 aside from it is a delicate way of saying that he 
 proceeds to take poison. Paying no heed to 
 every other consideration of the merits or defects 
 of this tragedy, its unfitness for stage representa- 
 tion is evidenced by the method taken to con- 
 clude it. To expect a miscellaneous audience to 
 sympathize with a piece of overstrained senti- 
 ment like this — a great and victorious general, 
 with an army devoted to him personally, led to 
 destroy himself on the very eve of his final 
 triumph, in consequence of his feelings having 
 been hurt on learning that the city to whose in- 
 terests he has been uniformly loyal, has come to 
 distrust him and is planning to destroy him — 
 to expect sympathy with a course of conduct 
 which is even more unnatural, if possible, than 
 it is irrational, could never enter the mind of a 
 dramatist who sought to portray life as it is and 
 men as they are. 
 
 The most damaging thing that could be said 
 against "Strafford" was that it indicated a lack 
 of that dramatic skill which enables a writer to 
 construct a successful acting play. But one can 
 
OF ROBERT BROWNING 73 
 
 be a great poet without being a great dramatic 
 poet. Browning's next venture was in his favor- 
 ite analysis of character. It was a production 
 which he had long been contemplating, and upon 
 which, with frequent interruptions, he had long 
 been working. It is sometimes stated — I know 
 not on what authority — that it was begun in 
 1838. Yet unless I am grossly mistaken, "Sor- 
 dello " is the work to which he alludes in the pref- 
 ace to the original edition of " Paracelsus." Be 
 that as it may, we know that it was advertised 
 on one of the leaves of the published play of 
 *' Strafford" as then nearly ready. We know 
 further from the diary of Harriet Martineau that 
 on December 23, 1837, Browning told her that 
 the poem in question would soon be done;* and 
 that on April 11 of the year following, he called 
 upon her just before leaving for Venice whither 
 he was going ip order to get a view of the locali- 
 ties mentioned in it.^ 
 
 However uncertain the time of composition, 
 there is not as much vagueness in our knowl- 
 edge of that, as there is in our knowledge of the 
 
 ' " Memorials of Harriet Martineau," by Maria Weston Chap- 
 man, in Autobiography of, Boston, 1877, vol. II, P.-325. 
 2 Ibid., p. 337. 
 
74 THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 
 
 hero of the poem. Here it suffices to say that 
 he was a troubadour of the thirteenth century, 
 the mention of whom by Dante, in the " Purga- 
 torio" has assured him of a wider recognition 
 than has been gained for him by the Httle which 
 has been preserved of his own writings. So far, 
 in truth, as the value of Browning's production is 
 concerned, the Sordello of history may be dis- 
 missed from consideration. The actual fort- 
 unes of the hero were of the sHtrhtest account in 
 the scope of the work. This is true also of the 
 various other characters introduced into it. 
 They serve little other purpose than to give an 
 air of actuality to the events described as tak- 
 ing place. But the poem itself. Browning em- 
 phatically declared, was nothing more than a 
 study in the development of a soul. Accord- 
 ingly it was from this point of view alone that he 
 wished it to be judged. 
 
 "Strafford" had been a disappointment. The 
 faults of "Paracelsus" had been there exhibited 
 in an aggravated form, while the beauties of that 
 work were conspicuously absent. But the de- 
 scent in popular estimate due to the play was 
 nothing compared to that caused by the poem 
 which followed it. Perhaps there is no in- 
 
OF ROBERT BROWNING 75 
 
 Stance in literary history of an author who pro- 
 ceeded to destroy his own reputation with more 
 systematic endeavor than did Browning in the 
 composition of "Sordello." Certainly never 
 were efforts of that sort attended with more 
 overwhelming success. Nothing was neglected. 
 ''Paracelsus" had at times presented difficulties 
 to the most thoughtful reader. But to thought- 
 ful and thoughtless alike "Sordello" presented 
 nothing else. Both to those who gave them- 
 selves up to its careful or careless perusal, it 
 was very much in the situation of the earth as 
 recorded in the story of the creation. It was 
 without form and void and darkness was on the 
 face of the deep. Mad the earth been left in 
 that state, it would have been found uninhabit- 
 able. "Sordello" was left in that state, and it 
 was found unreadable. 
 
 We are now frequendy assured that Browning 
 is not really obscure at all. The fault is not with 
 him, but with us. The idea that such a charge 
 can be made against "Sordello" in particular, we 
 are led by one of the poet's biographers to be- 
 lieve, indicates a mental obliquity so dense that 
 it amounts almost to moral perversity. It is in 
 the following glowing terms that the late Mr. 
 
76 THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 
 
 William Sharp, in his Hfe of the poet, expressed 
 his indignation at any assertion of the sort. 
 "Surely," he exclaimed, "this question of 
 Browning's obscurity was expelled to the limbo 
 of dead stupidities when Mr. Swinburne, in peri- 
 ods as resplendent as the whirling wheels of 
 Phoebus Apollo's chariot, wrote his famous in- 
 cidental passage on Chapman." 
 
 To him who has full faith in the view pro- 
 pounded by the biographer, it is somewhat de- 
 pressing to find him a little later in the same vol- 
 ume inferentially relegating to a habitation in 
 this limbo of dead stupidities the opinions of 
 Douglas Jerrold, Tennyson, and the Carlyles. 
 He tells us that they actually professed them- 
 selves unable to understand. From his later 
 utterances it is plain that Carlyle indeed fully 
 sympathized with his wife, who said that she had 
 read the poem through without being able to 
 make out whether Sordello was a man, a city, 
 or a book. The story of Jerrold is too well known 
 to bear recounting in full, and I refer to it in pass- 
 ing mainly because of the attitude toward it of 
 Browning himself. Given "Sordello" to read 
 while recovering from a severe illness, Jerrold 
 after wrestling with it for a while sank back in de- 
 
OF ROBERT BROWNING 77 
 
 spair in his bed with the exclamation, "O God, I 
 am an idiot!" The poet used to enjoy narrating 
 this incident, though naturally he took the ground 
 that there was no justification for the feeling. 
 Yet it must fairly be conceded that none of the 
 persons just mentioned can be deemed much in- 
 ferior to the average extoller of Browning's clear- 
 ness; collectively they might even be considered 
 equal to the Swinburne-Sharp combination of in- 
 tellectual astuteness and resplendent rhetoric. 
 
 This contemporary inability to understand 
 and appreciate "Sordello" has been explained 
 by some Browning enthusiasts as due to the fact 
 that the public of the time in which it appeared 
 was not intellectually athletic enough to grapple 
 with its difficulties. To overcome these was 
 needed the virile mental vigor of our own more 
 robust generation. Accordingly we can look 
 down with complacency as well as compassion 
 upon the failure to comprehend of still others of 
 those frailer spirits of the past who retired baffled 
 before what is to us so easy. One of these gentle 
 souls was Harriet Martineau. She had been 
 captivated by "Paracelsus." In her autobiog- 
 raphy she tells us that the poem having been lent 
 her, she, for the first time in her life, passed a 
 
78 THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 
 
 night without sleeping a wink in consequence of 
 reading a portion of it before going to bed. But 
 "Sordello" she found not conducive to wakeful- 
 ness. The attempted reading of it had made 
 Jerrold fear for his sanity; it made her fear for 
 her health. **I was so wholly unable to under- 
 stand it," she writes, "that I supposed myself 
 ill." Had she been really taken ill, it would have 
 appeared a just punishment for the advice she 
 had given the poet in this interview of the 23d of 
 December, 1837, already mentioned. He told 
 her then that not only "Sordello" would soon be 
 done, but that he had come to the conclusion to 
 deny himself preface and notes, as he must choose 
 between being historian or poet, and therefore 
 could not split the interest. She confirmed him 
 in this attitude. "I advised him," she said, "to 
 let the poem tell its own tale." Accordingly, it was 
 sent forth in its native obscurity. Rather than 
 not split the interest, no interest was left to split. 
 Charles Kingsley must also be included among 
 the contemporary stupids. Haifa score of years 
 later than "Sordello," his "Alton Locke" was 
 published. In it the hero is represented by the 
 novelist as giving an account of the conversation 
 he holds with the girl of higher station with whom 
 
OF ROBERT BROWNING 79 
 
 he is in love. "She talked," he says, "about 
 poetry, Tennyson, and Wordsworth; asked me 
 if I understood Browning's "Sordello"; — and 
 she comforted me, after my stammering con- 
 fession that I did not, by telling me that she was 
 delighted to hear that; for she did not under- 
 stand it either and it was pleasant to have a 
 companion in ignorance." Even earlier than 
 this Lowell had relegated his personal opinion 
 to this limbo of dead stupidities. In a review 
 of Browning's works, which was published in 
 1848, he gave the most cordial of recognitions to 
 the genius of the poet — at a time, too, when 
 such recognition was far from frequent in his 
 own country. But while conceding the excel- 
 lence of detached passages in "Sordello" he 
 pointed out its formlessness and the inadequacy 
 of its workmanship. "It was a fine poem," he 
 said, "before the author wrote it." His general 
 opinion as to its obscurity he had no hesitation 
 in expressing. "We may as well say bluntly,'* 
 he remarked, "it is totally incomprehensible as 
 a connected whole." ' 
 
 There is even a sadder story to be told of the 
 impression produced by this work. Among those 
 
 * North A merican Review for April, i'848. 
 
8o THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 
 
 who lacked then the requisite insight now so 
 common among the poet's devotees must be 
 reckoned the woman who was in a short time to 
 become his wife. She had hailed Browning be- 
 fore she knew him personally as the King of the 
 Mystics. During the year before her marriage, 
 when friendship was ripening into love, she ad- 
 mitted his obscurity — not, indeed, on the subject 
 of his feelings toward herself personally, in re- 
 gard to which from a very early period of their 
 acquaintance Browning seems to have ex- 
 hibited so little of his usual obscurity that he 
 fairly terrified her at first by his clearness. Miss 
 Barrett at that time confessed to a correspondent 
 that she herself was guilty of the sin of Sphinxine 
 literature, and had struggled hard to renounce it. 
 "Do you know," she added plaintively, "I have 
 been told that / have written things harder to in- 
 terpret than Browning himself.'' — only I can not, 
 can not believe it — he is so very hard." * To the 
 same friend she declared that "Sordello" had 
 many fine things, and was well worthy of study, 
 and, indeed, very peculiarly in need of study. 
 She would not therefore recommend its perusal, 
 
 ' "The Letters of Elizabeth Brownhig," New York, 1898, vol. I, 
 p. 254. 
 
OF ROBERT BROWNING 8l 
 
 though she was eager to have him read "Para- 
 celsus." "Sordello," she remarked, had been 
 thrown down by many as unintelligible, and had 
 been retained by herself as a specimen of the 
 Sphinxine literature in all its power. Under the 
 circumstances, this obtuseness may be forgiven 
 her. Mr. Swinburne's essay on Chapman had 
 not been written at that time, and in consequence 
 she could not well have been expected to know 
 better. 
 
 If these were the feelings of contemporaries 
 who were the most eminent in the literary world, 
 we can get some idea of the state of mind of the 
 ordinary critic at the time the poem appeared. 
 It is putting it mildly to say that he was dum- 
 founded. ''Sordello" came out at the very end 
 of February. Then as now the leading periodi- 
 cals which devoted themselves more or less to 
 literary criticism were frequently, if not regularly, 
 furnished with advance copies. Consequently it 
 was not unusual for them to review books as 
 soon as they were nominally published. But 
 hardly anything of the kind took place now. 
 The critical journals were either silent, or they 
 waited. The Spectator was the only important 
 weekly that gave immediate attention to the 
 
82 THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 
 
 work; but that it was enabled to do by its treat- 
 ment of it. It went on the principle that it is not 
 necessary to wade all through a mud-puddle to 
 become aware that it is a mud-puddle. "What 
 this poem may be in its extent," it observed, "we 
 are unable to say, for we cannot read it. What- 
 ever may be the poetical spirit of Browning, it is 
 so overlaid In 'Sordcllo' by digression, affecta- 
 tion, obscurity, and all the faults that spring, it 
 would seem, from crudity of plan and self-opin- 
 ion, which will neither cull thoroughly nor revise 
 composition, that the reader — at least the reader 
 of our stamp — turns away." Two weeks later 
 The Atlas paid attention to the poem. Its critic 
 had been an ardent admirer of what was then 
 deemed Browning's first work. But in "Sor- 
 dcllo" he was utterly disappointed, and ex- 
 pressed with earnestness his disapproval. It 
 was worse, he said, than "Strafford." That 
 drama had shown a descent from the high prom- 
 ise of "Paracelsus." In this third production, 
 however, all the faults of the first were exhibited 
 in an intensified form, without the compensation 
 of an equal amount of excellence in any single 
 point of view.- 
 
 ' March 28, 1840. 
 
OF ROBERT BROWNING 83 
 
 Neither the Literary Gazette nor Hie Examiner 
 reviewed the poem at all. In the case of the lat- 
 ter the omission was peculiarly significant. We 
 know from notices written hy Forstcr of certain 
 of Browning's later work that"SorcleIlo" was too 
 much for even that faithful and devoted friend. 
 He clearly did not feel it in his power to speak 
 well of it; therefore he chose to say nothing at all. 
 The only review which seems to have been the 
 result of an effort, honest whether adequate or 
 inadequate, to penetrate into the meaning of the 
 poem, was thatwhich appeared in TheAthcnceum. 
 This, however, did not come out till three months 
 later. The criticism, though the fruit of careful 
 study and of arduous and it might almost be said 
 of indignant industry, was hardly more favorable 
 than the others. It spoke in the severest terms 
 of the mannerisms found in the poem, of its 
 peculiarities of language, of its disregard of 
 euphony, of its occupying the reader's attention 
 with novelties of construction which he must mas- 
 ter in order to grasp the meaning lost to appre- 
 hension in cloudy depths. It further censured 
 the oracular utterances which turned out when 
 unwrapped from their profusion of words to be 
 nothing more than commonplace truths. I am 
 
84 THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 
 
 here stating the critic's point of view, not up- 
 holding its correctness. But whether the judg- 
 ment be true or false it is worth quoting as seem- 
 ingly the only contemporary notice of the work 
 in which a serious attempt was made to study it 
 as a whole/ 
 
 So much for the estimate of "Sordello" taken 
 at the time by the leading critical authorities. 
 Few as have been the citations given, they may 
 be safely regarded as fairly representative of 
 general contemporary opinion. If a favorable 
 word can be found for the work in any quarter, 
 even the obscurest, it seems to have escaped so far 
 the hardest search. Certain it is that Browning 
 did all that lay in his power to make difficult the 
 comprehension of the poem; at least he omitted 
 to do anything that would render its compre- 
 hension easier. All the usual, not to say neces- 
 sary, helps were left unprovided. Let us con- 
 sider as a single item the historical settins:. The 
 action of the poem takes place in Italy in the 
 earlier half of the thirteenth century. In this 
 remote period, in the history of a foreign land, 
 the events which form the background consist of 
 nothing more important than the petty feuds 
 
 * Athenaum, May 3, 1840. 
 
OF ROBERT BROWNING 85 
 
 which went on in the ItaHan cities between the 
 adherents of the Pope and of the Emperor. The 
 contests of these factions often deserve Milton's 
 characterization of the bickerings between the 
 Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, that it was as worth 
 while to chronicle the wars of kites and crows 
 flocking and fighting in the air. No one but a 
 special student of the period would or could know 
 the details, or form any conception of the char- 
 acters whose names flit to and fro across the 
 pages of the poem. 
 
 Yet the account of the mental struggles Sor- 
 dello is represented as undergoing presuppose 
 some knowledge of the facts both of his personal 
 career and of the events in which he took part. 
 If this knowledge does not exist or is not fur- 
 nished, the reader is confused at the very outset 
 by the mention of names about whose owners the 
 story gives no light, and by allusions to incidents 
 of which he is almost inevitably in the blindest 
 ignorance. They have not much bearing, it can 
 justly be said, upon the development of the 
 hero's soul. So much the more reason was there 
 that these obstacles in the way of comprehension 
 should have been removed. The very briefest 
 outline of the facts referred to or mentioned, the 
 
86 T1IK RARLY LITKRARY CAREER 
 
 very briefest account of the personages and places 
 introduced would have given the reader a van- 
 tage-ground from which to attack the other dif- 
 fuiilrics of the poem. Such a course would cer- 
 tainly have prevented Mrs. Carlyle from being 
 in doubt whether Sordello was a man, a city, or 
 a book. 
 
 But Browning was far from pandering to that 
 depraved taste which hungered and thirsted for 
 useful information, lie disdained to impart it. 
 The facts contained or referred to in the poem 
 were, he said, of no importance in themselves as 
 regards the main idea he had in mind. At any 
 rare the reader ought to be ashamed of himself 
 for not knowing them. Such was his attitude, 
 nor only in rhe case of rhis work, but of several 
 which appeared subsequently. He accordingly 
 condescended to cast no light upon "Sordello." 
 The only assistance allorded later to its compre- 
 hension was rhe running title at the head of each 
 page. These are not to be found in the original 
 edition. They are at rimes so much a help rhat 
 one naturally waxes indignant that a help of this 
 sort should be needed at all; for the obscurity 
 which envelops rhe work as a whole extends con- 
 stantly to details. For illustration, there is in 
 
OF ROBERT BROWNING 87 
 
 the opening book an apostrophe to some poet, 
 whom he asks this time to come not near and 
 thereby scare him with his pure face. There is 
 nothing in the text to indicate who is the person 
 here addressed. Scores of writers might be 
 guessed by those ignorant of Browning's special 
 likes and disHkes; and in that condition must be 
 assumed to have been nearly all the readers he 
 was then likely to have. The running title now 
 on the page following dispels the doubt. It is 
 headed "Shelley departing, Verona appears." 
 This enables us to see who it is that the author 
 had in mind; but such an illegitimate way of 
 imparting needed information is not the way for 
 him to follow who writes to be understood. 
 
 To the very end of his days, however, Brown- 
 ing never swerved from the belief that he himself 
 was not in the slightest degree responsible for the 
 failure of this poem — for the failure of people to 
 buy it, or of people to understand it who did buy 
 it. In the case of any one of his works, indeed, 
 he was inclined to be impatient with those who 
 hinted that labor spent upon Its correction might 
 result in adding to its intelligibility. As regards 
 "Sordello," however, once he paid heed to a sug- 
 gestion of this sort. It came from' the woman 
 
8S THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 
 
 who was soon to give him the promise of becom- 
 ing his wife. In September, 1845, she made use 
 of the influence she had already acquired and 
 urged him to recast the poem. ''It is," she 
 wrote, "like a noble picture with its face to the 
 wall just now, or at least in the shadow." It 
 needed drawing together and fortifying in the 
 connections and associations, "which," she 
 added, "hang as loosely every here and there as 
 those in a dream, and confound the reader who 
 persists in thinking himself awake." 
 
 That Browning had determined to make a re- 
 vision in consequence of the wish she expressed, 
 the further correspondence between the two re- 
 veals. In a letter written to him the following 
 month, Miss Barrett speaks of "the new avatar 
 of 'Sordello' which you taught me to look for." 
 The matter was therefore, clearly in contem- 
 plation. But the deity whose avatar she ex- 
 pected never became incarnate. While in Paris, 
 in the first half of 1856, Browning did indeed 
 make an effort to revise the poem. He spent 
 much labor and pains, he tells us, to turn the 
 work into what the many might like instead of 
 what the few must like. But he gave up the at- 
 tempt and left it essentially as he found it. Lines 
 
OF ROBERT BROWNING 
 
 were added, changes of expression were made, 
 but there was nothing altered in the framework 
 and contexture. What the poem needed in order 
 to be rendered intelHgible and interesting was 
 not occasional revision, but a complete recast; 
 and of an undertaking of this kind Browning had 
 then become absolutely incapable. 
 
 In dedicating "Sordello" later to his friend 
 Melsand, of Dijon, the poet told him that he 
 blamed nobody for its failure, least of all himself. 
 This last phrase is significant. It reflects his in- 
 variable mental attitude. His faults of expres- 
 sion, he acknowledged, were many; but people 
 might have surmounted the difficulties caused by 
 them, had they cared to take the pains; if they 
 did not care enough for the book or its writer to 
 do this, what would avail its faultlessness ? 
 Never was there a more unblushing declaration 
 on the part of an author of his willingness to shift 
 upon the reader the burden of clearing a path 
 through the jungle of his expression which he 
 himself was too indolent or too indifferent to 
 open up. An attitude of this sort jars heavily 
 upon the feelings of the man who regards it as the 
 first requirement of a book to be made as read- 
 able as possible for those for whose perusal it was 
 
90 THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 
 
 designed: and that one of the first requisites 
 for this result is that it should not need help out- 
 side of itself to be rendered intelligible. Per- 
 sonally, too, I confess to getting no particular 
 enjoyment from a production which stands in 
 need of perpetual commentary. Still tastes are 
 different. The existence of many worthy per- 
 sons must be conceded who are unable to enjoy 
 literary food of any sort until it has gone through 
 a preliminary process of mastication by some- 
 body else. 
 
 It follows from what has been said that this 
 poem is much more a revelation of Browning's 
 soul that it is of Sordello's. It is further to be 
 added that it fully merited the fate which it has 
 been its lot to undergo. In one sense it is inter- 
 esting as a study. It has all the worst qualities 
 of Browning's style. Rugged versification, ab- 
 rupt transition we are prepared to put up with 
 in all his pieces. But in this poem, these pe- 
 culiarities of diction are carried to the extreme. 
 The liberty taken with expression often more 
 than approaches lawlessness; it is lawlessness 
 itself. As one illustration out of several, phrases 
 and sometimes clauses are inserted into sen- 
 tences, necessarily breaking the continuity of the 
 
OF ROBERT BROWNING gi 
 
 thought. Sparingly introduced, these, if brief, 
 may be no blemish; sometimes they are a posi- 
 tive ornament. But it is an essential condition 
 of their value that they should be introduced only 
 sparingly. In "Sordello" they not only appear 
 often, but sometimes in the most aggravated — 
 and to use a modern colloquialism — in the most 
 aggravating form. In more than one instance 
 the intercalary sentence w^hich occupies the mid- 
 dle of another consists of several lines. Neces- 
 sarily, the reader fails to carry in his mind, 
 amidst this pressure of intrusive matter, w^hat the 
 author has been talking about previously. Con- 
 sequently, v^hen he arrives at the jumping-off 
 place of the remarks inserted, he has to retrace 
 his steps and go back to w^here he left off in or- 
 der to resume the connection of thought. This 
 usage Is bad enough in prose; in poetry it is 
 absolutely intolerable. It could never be re- 
 sorted to by the conscious literary artist. 
 
 This, hov^ever. Is but a single one of the fatal 
 defects which beset expression In "Sordello." 
 The poem fails In a number of other and more 
 essential things which go to constitute poetry. 
 There It stops short. You may apply to It any 
 other characterization you choose. You may 
 
92 
 
 THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 
 
 call it metaphysical, psychological, intellectual, 
 problematical, profoundly thoughtful, what in- 
 deed you will. But never once does it fulfil the 
 function for which poetry exists. It never once 
 stirs the heart, it never once uplifts the soul. 
 As an aid to mental discipline, as an incitement 
 to the efforts of those who have, or fancy they 
 have,penetrated its mystery and thereby achieved 
 an intellectual victory against great odds, it may 
 be regarded as fulfilling a valuable function. 
 But by those who believe that the first business of 
 a poem is to be poetical, it will never be regarded 
 otherwise than as a failure. It will remain a 
 colossal derelict upon the sea of literature, in- 
 flicting damage upon the strongest intellects that 
 graze it even slightly, and hopelessly wrecking 
 the frailer mental craft that come into full colli- 
 sion with it — at least such is the impression one 
 gets from the essays written upon it. 
 
 I have dwelt so long upon this work because 
 of the influence it had upon Browning's later 
 fortunes. It was something more than failure 
 that greeted "Sordello." It imposed a burden 
 upon the reputation of the poet against the press- 
 ure of which it was impossible for it to bear up. 
 The pity of it is that its ill success not merely 
 
OF ROBERT BROWNING 
 
 93 
 
 injured the repute of this particular production, 
 but it placed what was soon to show itself an 
 almost unsurmountable obstacle in the way o^ 
 the beautiful works that were speedily to follow. 
 The public mind was thenceforth prejudiced 
 against the poet. With the appearance of "Sor- 
 dello" began the eclipse of Browning's reputa- 
 tion which even after the lapse of more than a 
 third of a century had not passed away. Not 
 but that he had in the worst of times a band of 
 devoted admirers. But the number was small, 
 nor were those composing it influential, however 
 able. With the general public of even the highly 
 educated he thenceforth ceased to be a power. 
 This indeed is much more true of England than 
 of America. Yet even in this country, where 
 familiarity with his writings was altogether 
 greater than in his own, his reputation was far 
 from proportionate to his merits. In England 
 there was further a sort of resentful feeling as to 
 the character of his work, as if it evinced a deter- 
 mined disposition not to pay any heed to the 
 legitimate requirements of the reader. "He is 
 further chargeable," wrote the reviewer of "Sor- 
 dello" in The Atlas, "with betraying the dis- 
 agreeable truth that the author has not only 
 
94 
 
 ROBERT BROWNING 
 
 benefited nothing from experience, but that the 
 sins of his verse are premeditated, wilful, and in- 
 curable/* These words assuredly expressed 
 the sentiment of large numbers. Included, too, 
 among them were many who liked Browning as 
 a man, many who had been previously disposed 
 to admire him as a poet. "Ephraim is joined 
 to his idols, let him alone," represented thence- 
 forth the general state of mind. Let alone 
 severely he most assuredly was. 
 
Ill 
 
 "BELLS AND POMEGRANATES" 
 
 " PIPPA PASSES." "A BLOT I' THE 'SCUTCHEON » 
 
 The success of *'SordeIlo" had not been such 
 as to encourage the production of further works. 
 But Browning himself was not discouraged, 
 either at the time or later. He had, as he wrote 
 to a friend the following year, "a head full of 
 projects — mean to song- write, pi ay- write forth- 
 with." Even then three works had been writ- 
 ten or were in contemplation. He felt, indeed, 
 his mind thronging with ideas to which he must 
 give utterance and solicited by schemes which he 
 must carry into effect. 
 
 But a publisher could not well be expected to 
 furnish at his own expense literature which the 
 public was unwilling to buy; and Browning him- 
 self could hardly procure the means to under- 
 take any great venture at his own risk. At this 
 
 95 
 
()6 THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 
 
 juncture Moxon made him a proposal. He was 
 at that tune bringing out editions of the Eliza- 
 bethan dramatists in a cheap form, printing 
 their works in fine but clear type, two columns 
 to a page. If Browning was willing to publish 
 his poems in this manner, the expense would not 
 amount to more than twelve to sixteen pounds 
 for each volume, issued as a pamphlet. It could 
 in consequence be sold for a small sum, and 
 readers might naturally be attracted by the low- 
 ness of the price. Browning accepted the pro- 
 posal. Hence arose the series of volumes which 
 appeared under the general title of "Bells and 
 Pomegranates." These began in 1841 and 
 ended in 1846. They contain some of the best 
 work the poet ever produced; assuredly many 
 of the pieces by which he is best known to the 
 majority of readers. Yet in spite of their cheap- 
 ness and excellence these volumes seem to have 
 attained nothing like the circulation they de- 
 served. I can not find that a second edition of 
 any of them ever came out at the time. There 
 is an apparent exception in the case of one of the 
 tragedies; but it is only apparent. 
 
 The general title given to these works puzzled 
 everybody; at least everybody who has left a re- 
 
OF ROBERT BROWNING 97 
 
 corded opinion. In fact, it continued to remain 
 a mystery until the concluding number of the 
 series. Then Browning, under what may be 
 called domestic pressure, condescended to give 
 an explanation of it. The reviewer in The 
 Athcnaum was perplexed in his notice of the 
 first number of the series, and his words are sug- 
 gestive of the reputation the poet had now ac- 
 quired. "Mr. Browning's conundrums," he 
 wrote, "begin with his very title-page. 'Bells 
 and Pomegranates' is the general title given 
 (it is reasonable to suppose Mr. Browning knows 
 why, but certainly we have not yet found out — 
 indeed 'we give it up')."' It proved later, in- 
 deed, too much for the comprehension of his 
 future wife. "Do tell me," she wrote in Octo- 
 ber, 1845, "what you mean precisely by your 
 *BelI and Pomegranates' title. I have always 
 understood it to refer to the Hebraic priestly gar- 
 ment — but Mr. Kenyon held against me the 
 other day that your reference was different, 
 though he had not the remotest idea how. And 
 yesterday I forgot to ask, for not the first time. 
 Tell me, too, why you should not in the new num- 
 ber satisfy by a note somewhere, the Davuses of 
 
 ' No. 737, Dec. II, 1841. 
 
98 THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 
 
 the world who are in the majority, with a solu- 
 tion of this one Sphinx riddle."^ To this re- 
 quest Browning acceded, though he thought it 
 best to put off the explanation till the closing 
 number of the series.^ But before that time 
 came, he seems to have changed his mind. He 
 was apparently disposed to let the title remain 
 in what was to himself its self-evident clearness. 
 At least that is the impression received from the 
 words of the one person who would not be denied . 
 "I persist in thinking," wrote Miss Barrett in 
 March, 1846,^ "that you ought not to be too dis- 
 dainful to explain your meaning in the * Pome- 
 granates.' Surely you might say in a word or 
 two, that your title having been doubted about 
 (to your surprise, you might say!) you refer the 
 doubters to the Jewish priest's robe, and the 
 Rabbinical gloss — for I suppose it is a gloss on 
 the robe — do you not think so .? Consider that 
 Mr. Kenyon and I may fairly represent the aver- 
 age intelligence of your readers — and that he was 
 altogether in the clouds as to your meaning — 
 had not the most distant notion of it — while I, 
 
 ' "The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett," 
 vol. I, p. 248. 
 
 ^ Ibid., p. 249. ^ Ibid., p. 570. 
 
OF ROBERT BROWNING 99 
 
 taking hold of the priest's garment, missed the 
 Rabbins and the distinctive significance, as com- 
 pletely as he did. Now why should you be too 
 proud to teach such persons as only desire to be 
 taught?" 
 
 Miss Barrett's persistence at last won the day. 
 Browning submitted, as she put it, "quite at the 
 point of the bayonet." ^ Accordingly, when the 
 eighth and final number of the series came out in 
 1846, he reluctantly and somewhat grumblingly 
 proceeded to paint the lily by explaining still 
 further what was in his eyes self-evident. Per- 
 haps nothing can be found anywhere more in- 
 dicative than were his words on this occasion, 
 of his general attitude; of his absolute incapac- 
 ity to comprehend that a particular train of as- 
 sociation of ideas familiar to him, and therefore 
 to him perfectly clear, should not be as clear to 
 every one else. "I take the opportunity of ex- 
 plaining," he wrote, "in reply to inquiries, that 
 I only meant by that title to indicate an endeavor 
 toward something like an alternation, or mixt- 
 ure of music with discoursing, sound with sense, 
 poetry with thought, which looks too ambitious 
 
 ' " Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett," vol. II, 
 p. 67. 
 
THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 
 
 thus expressed, so the symbol was preferred. It 
 is Httle to the purpose that such is actually one of 
 the most familiar of the many Rabbinical (and 
 Patristic) acceptations of the phrase; because I 
 confess, that letting authority alone, I supposed 
 the bare words, in such juxtaposition, would 
 sufficiently convey the desired meaning." 
 
 There you see it. Of course, if you had been 
 possessed of any sense, you would have seen it 
 before. There is something delightful in the 
 naive astonishment expressed that any one should 
 have found the slightest perplexity in compre- 
 hending at once the meaning which the juxta- 
 position of the two main words of the title so 
 plainly indicates. It is furthermore so common 
 a thing with all lovers of poetry to have a wide 
 acquaintance with rabbinical and patristic liter- 
 ature that this knowledge ought to have suggested 
 the sijrnification to him who had not the sense to 
 guess it for himself. Browning's course has been 
 defended on the ground that dealing from earliest 
 years with out-of-the-way topics, they had be- 
 come so familiar to him that he assumed that all 
 persons knew them as well as he did himself. 
 This is attributing to him much special learning, 
 but little sense in the use of it. His acquire- 
 
OF ROBERT BROWNING 
 
 merits were certainly great. But there must 
 always be a certain feeling of distrust of him 
 who seems to know everything about subjects of 
 which hardly any one else knows anything. In 
 matters, too, where he can be followed with 
 comparative ease, he more than once displayed 
 misapprehension and ignorance where he as- 
 sumed to have perfect knowledge. What con- 
 fidence, accordingly, can we always have in the 
 value of the treasures he brings back from his 
 excursions into the realms of the mysterious 
 where few can follow him, and those few rarely 
 readers of poetry .? 
 
 So much for the title; now for the works them- 
 selves. The first number of the series was "Pippa 
 Passes." To "Paracelsus" Browning had re- 
 fused to apply the term "drama"; yet by that 
 designation he chose to denote this production. 
 It is hard to see why he should have given to the 
 one the name he had denied to the other. The 
 only easily discoverable reason is that the poet 
 was now coming to be dominated by the doctrine 
 of the unities. He consequently called the later 
 work a drama because the scene of it is laid in 
 one place, and the time is limited to the daylight 
 of one day. But while it is a poem dramatically 
 
THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 
 
 told, it is in no proper sense of the word what 
 he designated it. It consists of a series of ab- 
 solutely independent scenes bound together by 
 this single slight tie, that upon the action of the 
 various personages in them, Pippa, as she passes, 
 produces a deep and permanent impression. 
 
 The poem was published in the first half of 
 1 841. Both in conception and execution it is one 
 of Browning's happiest performances. It is en- 
 tirely free from certain defects which are apt to 
 characterize his other pieces of a dramatic char- 
 acter. There is nowhere in it any violation of 
 that natural probability which should govern the 
 actions and emotions of the characters. It is an 
 old adage that truth is stranger than fiction. We 
 all know that it is the unexpected that frequently 
 happens, that what in a tale would seem highly 
 improbable occurs at times in fact. But to de- 
 vices of this kind neither novelist nor playwright 
 has a right to resort, unless in very exceptional 
 instances. They are precisely of the nature of 
 the dcus ex machina to which long ago Horace 
 justly objected. Accordingly, if indulged in at 
 all, it should be only on very extraordinary oc- 
 casions. Writers of these two classes — that is, 
 novelists and playwrights — are bound to repre- 
 
OF ROBERT BROWNING 103 
 
 sent men as th^ey appear to us acting under con- 
 ditions which are normal. Even when the cir- 
 cumstances are exceptiWal, the characters are 
 to conduct themselves as we^^hould ekpect to 
 find them behaving in real life. To resort not 
 to the merely surprising, but to the surprising 
 which is also unnatural and improbable, shows 
 a deficiency in skill, if not in the highest art. It 
 may occasionally be pardoned for the sake of the 
 efl^ect it produces, but it can rarely be approved. 
 No fault of this sort appears in "Pippa Passes," 
 unless one were to consider such what seems to 
 me the perfectly legitimate extension to several 
 persons of an influence which everybody would 
 concede might well have happened to any partic- 
 ular individual of them all. We know from our 
 own observation, if not from our own experience, 
 that a remark overheard, a chance word spoken 
 with not the least thought on the part of the 
 speaker of affecting the course of another, often 
 influences profoundly the whole life of the hearer. 
 It is too common to need more than a mere state- 
 ment; yet in this work for the first time in litera- 
 ture, at least in English literature, has the idea 
 been set forth in completeness. Here it is made 
 the groundwork upon which the whole action of 
 
104 I'lIJ^ EARLY LITERARY CAREER 
 
 the piece turns. The girl of the silk mills, igno- 
 rant of father, ignorant of mother, appears on this 
 one clay of pleasure that diversifies her year of 
 toil as the central figure destined to influence the 
 future of the four groups of persons whom she 
 pictures to herself as the most happy in Asolo — 
 rising slowly in her own conception from the rapt- 
 ure of guilty love, through the love of bride and 
 groom, of mother and son, to the happiness of the 
 love which is devoted to the service of the Maker. 
 Impersonating all these characters in her fancy, 
 she comes upon each of the groups at the critical 
 moment, wakening with her song remorse for 
 guilt, imparting nobility of resolve, strengthen- 
 ing high-hearted but failing resolution, and 
 again utterly destroying the force of insidious 
 temptation. Unconsciously to herself she has 
 been a messenger of heaven to punish the guilty 
 and to reward the good. As she passes, she 
 leaves behind crime loathing its own foulness, 
 evil devices frustrated, misfortune averted, 
 schemes that threatened her own fate rendered 
 abortive, by inspiring the characters either with 
 remorse or with feelings which impart nobility 
 to life and bring consolation to the hour of death. 
 The scheme of the poem as a whole is worked 
 
OF ROBERT BROWNING 105 
 
 out with consummate skill. It is both high mo- 
 rality and high art. It is free from almost every- 
 thing that is objectionable in Browning's man- 
 ner, though of course it is not free from his 
 mannerisms; for if the mannerisms were lacking, 
 the work would hardly have seemed Browning's. 
 In it, too, appeared for the first time a specimen 
 of that vivid and vigorous prose conversation 
 which the poet was to exhibit on a fuller scale in 
 "A Soul's Tragedy," the last work of the series. 
 In "Pippa Passes" this power is little more than 
 indicated; but in the second part of "A Soul's 
 Tragedy" it is fully exhibited. It is there so 
 genuine, so much more dramatic than his verse 
 that one must always regret that Browning did 
 not see his way to resort to it more frequently. 
 It is especially remarkable for being so distinct 
 from his ordinary prose, as regards clearness and 
 naturalness and brilliancy. All these it has in 
 a profusion which puts the poet on a level with 
 the greatest of the Elizabethan playwrights. On 
 the contrary, much of his ordinary prose lacks all 
 the charm which belongs to his verse and ex- 
 hibits nearly all its defects. 
 
 "Pippa Passes" has been from the beginning 
 a favorite of readers with whom Browning him- 
 
lo6 THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 
 
 sell' is ;i r.ivoiiic. lii ilicir cinly coni-spoiulcnce, 
 Ixloif lluy li;i(I ;i(lii;illy iml, Ins liKurc wife 
 loiilcsscd lo liiin iIkiI sIu: could liiul it in her 
 liciui to covii ihc ;iiit!iorshij) o( th;i( |iocin more 
 til. Ill ol ;iny oilier of his works.' In Ins reply 
 J{rovviniij' (leihiied lliiil lie liiiiis( ll liked il better 
 th;m iinylhin;; else lie had evei done.' I here 
 W;is every reason indeed to expeil loi it great 
 siieeess, at least wilh the most lullivaled elass of 
 readers. SoinelliiiiL!, ol (hat siuicss it doiihlless 
 (lid adain. Uiil "Sordello" had now aeioin- 
 plished Its latal work. I lure is no ohsinniy m 
 *' l*ippa Passes" vvln\h should detei' from its lull 
 coinj)rcliensioii any reasonahle and reasoning 
 creature. I hose |)eeuliaiilies ol expression 
 which ill previous works had oil ended so many 
 were hen-, l>ut tluy were- few. What manner- 
 isms weri- exhihitcd, weii" cxhihited usually in 
 a loini to which there lonid he no oh)e(.lion even 
 if they did not add atti acti\ iness to exprission. 
 luiilhermore, the produition contaiiu-d idias of 
 deepest signilicance, couched in poetry of the 
 liighest onler. Ihit with tlie exception of I'lit' 
 
 '"Lrllcis of Ivolu-rl Tlri>\viiin|.; ;iu<l I'',li/al)i-tli Itarii-ll," vol. I, 
 p. aa. 
 
 » Jhid., p. jH. 
 
OF ROBERT BROWNING 107 
 
 • Examiner the work met a somewhat cool recep- 
 tion from the leading critical organs ofithat day. 
 This review in TJie Examiner — which is found 
 m the number for October 2, 1841 — is notice- 
 able, because it is evident from it that Brown- 
 ing's faithful partisan, Forster, had been sorely 
 tried by the production of "Sordello." It is in- 
 teresting to read his words for the effort he made 
 to put a good face upon what in his inmost heart 
 he felt to be a failure. "'Paracelsus,'" he wrote, 
 "announced a new and original poet — one of the 
 rarest things met with in these days; much cried 
 out for, much sought after, and when found 
 much objected to. We dare say 'Paracelsus' 
 did not succeed; we never heard of a second edi- 
 tion." Then he went on to express himself in 
 regard to the huge obstruction which the poet 
 had raised in the way of his own fame, and the 
 oblivion which in the space of less than two years 
 had overtaken the work upon which he had 
 staked his hopes of renown, "Mr. Browning," 
 he continued, "has published since then; in our 
 opinion not so well. But yet not so as to falsify 
 any anticipation formed of the character of his 
 genius. To write a bad poem is one thing; to 
 write a poem on a bad system is another and 
 
io8 THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 
 
 very clifFcrcnt. When a greater curiosity about 
 the writer shall hereafter disentomb 'Sordello/ 
 it will not be admired for its faults, but in spite 
 of them its power and its beauty will be per- 
 ceived." 
 
 Forster warmly praised "Pippa Passes"; but 
 his is the only unmixed tribute of admiration 
 which can be found in the Icadingweckly dispen- 
 sers to the public of ready-made literary judg- 
 ments. The poem must have been published 
 in April, for The Spectator reviewed it in the 
 number which appeared on the seventeenth of 
 that month. In that periodical the critic had 
 reached the conclusion that the production, so far 
 as it had then come out, was the first number of a 
 drama, which was called "Bells and Pomegran- 
 ates.'* Such was his solution of the problem of 
 the title. Accordingly, as this preliminary por- 
 tion exhibited only part of a play, allowance must 
 be made for it, as it would necessarily be the 
 least stirring in its action and the least inter- 
 esting in its passion. " PIppa Passes," there- 
 fore, it was the sapient conclusion, was not itself 
 a drama, but scenes in dialogue without cohe- 
 rence and action. It was not devoid of good 
 thoughts poetically expressed, was the conde- 
 
OF ROBERT BROWNING 
 
 log 
 
 scending admission, but these were perfectly 
 ineffective from being in a wrong place. Crude 
 as is this comment, its Interest as a specimen of 
 critical imbecility yields to the superior density of 
 apprehension exhibited by the reviewer in The 
 Atlas} Why Pippa kept passing puzzled this 
 literary judge sadly. He supposed it must be 
 for some sinister purpose to be revealed later. 
 Both these critics assumed the poem not to be 
 an independent whole, but part of a larger work 
 concealed under the general title of " Bells and 
 Pomegranates," of the meaning of which they 
 frankly acknowledged they had not the most re- 
 mote suspicion. 
 
 The Literary Gazette, whose influence, how- 
 ever, was now dying out, did not notice the work 
 at all; and The AtJienccum delayed its criticism 
 till about the end of the year. The reviewer had 
 not wasted this long period of preparation. He 
 really understood and appreciated the scheme 
 of the poem which he justly characterized as re- 
 markably beautiful. One gets from his notice, 
 indeed, a fairly clear conception of the idea run- 
 ning through it. But even in his case the effect 
 which had been wrought by "Sordello" was 
 
 ' Number for May i, 1841. 
 
THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 
 
 plainly visible J Ic began his criticism in a 
 somewhat truculent way, yet his words are 
 worth heeding, not for their truth, but for the ex- 
 hibition they afford of the point of view which 
 had begun to prevail even among those who had 
 at first been disposed to regard the poet favorably. 
 "Mr. lirowning," he wrote, "is one of those 
 authors, whom, for the sake of an air of original- 
 ity and an apparent disposition to tlinik, as a 
 motive for writing, we have taken more than 
 connnon pains to understand, or than it may 
 perhaps turn out that he is worth. Our faith 
 in him, however, is not yet extinct — but our pa- 
 tience is. More familiarized as we arc, now, 
 with his manner — having conquered that rudi- 
 ment to the right reading of his productions — 
 we yet find his texts nearly as obscure as ever — 
 getting, nevertheless, a glimpse, every now and 
 then, of meanings which it might have been well 
 worth his while to put into I'lnglish." * 
 
 These are the kind of notices which this most 
 ex(|uisite of poems received from the leading con- 
 icmjioraiy arbiters of public opinion. 1 he es- 
 timate taken by the smaller fry of critics may eas- 
 ily be guessed. Hut theie had now begun to 
 
 ' Numl)cr for Di-ci'iulx-r ii, 1841. 
 
OF ROBERT BROWNING 
 
 operate against the reputation of the poet some- 
 thing far worse than bitter attack. It was indif- 
 ference. He was not censured, lie was simply 
 ignored. Not even that most powerful provoca- 
 tive to sale, a denunciation of the morality of 
 "Pippa Passes," had any perceptible effect in 
 increasing its circulation. I'he scene between 
 Sebald and Ottima has always made a certain 
 class of persons look askance upon the poem. 
 At the time of its appearance, it awakened an 
 occasional protest. The feelings of some of the 
 critics were indeed profoundly outraged. "Nor 
 does the moral tone," said the reviewer in The 
 Spectator^ "appear to be the kind likely to be 
 tolerated on the stage and approved of anywhere. 
 In one scene a young wife and her paramour dis- 
 cuss their loves, and the murder of the 'old hus- 
 band' needlessly, openly, wantonly, tediously, 
 and without a touch of compunction, sentiment, 
 or true passion." This was the way in which 
 appeared to this astute literary guide that tre- 
 mendous scene in which sin, suddenly shown its 
 own grossness, seeks death as the only expiation 
 for guilt. It may be worth while, in consequence, 
 to record the prophetic insight of the same gifted 
 intellectual luminary who had discovered that 
 
THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 
 
 "Pippa Passes" was the first part of a play. 
 The future story, he told us, was to turn upon 
 the endeavor of monsignor, the prelate, to get 
 his niece, brought up as a peasant, inveigled to 
 Rome as a prostitute, in order that he might get 
 possession of her property. Well was he entitled 
 to add that the plot was a novelty. 
 
 The recognition which was given at the time 
 to **Pippa Passes'* was not essentially different 
 from that which came to most of the seven other 
 parts which made up the series of " Bells and 
 Pomegranates." There was then, as always, a 
 small band of devoted admirers. But the gen- 
 eral public, even of the highly educated, was, 
 and continued to remain, indifferent. In the 
 numbers which followed were printed six regular 
 plays — all, indeed, that Browning henceforth 
 ever wrote. They were entitled " King Victor 
 and King Charles," pubHshed early in 1842; 
 **The Return of the Druses," published in April, 
 1843; "A Blot i' the 'Scutcheon" acted and 
 printed earlier in the same year; "Colombe's 
 Birthday," which appeared in the spring of 1844; 
 and finally the plays of "Luria" and "A Soul's 
 Tragedy," which made up the eighth and last 
 number of the series. This came out in the 
 
OF ROBERT BROWNING 
 
 spring of 1846. Only two of these pieces have 
 ever been represented on the regular stage. One 
 was "Colombe's Birthday" which was acted 
 seven times at the Haymarket Theater by Helen 
 Faucit, during April and May, 1853, and later 
 in the provinces. The other was "A Blot i' 
 the 'Scutcheon," the story of which demands de- 
 tailed exammation. 
 
 A trustworthy account of the fortunes of this 
 play is all the more important because the gross- 
 est misstatements about it have become current. 
 They have indeed, become so current that there 
 is no little danger of their permanent embodi- 
 ment in literary history. The pity of it is that 
 these misstatements owe their origin largely to 
 Browning himself — I need hardly add, with no 
 idea on his part of their fictitious nature. The 
 production of "A Blot i' the 'Scutcheon" was in 
 one respect an event in his life. It led to an 
 estrangement between him and Macready. The 
 great actor in consequence had no share in the 
 performance of this tragedy, though it was 
 brought out at his theater. The part he would 
 naturally have taken was assumed by Samuel 
 Phelps. According to Browning's statement it 
 was his own personal dissatisfaction with the re- 
 
114 T?IE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 
 
 luctance shown at first by Macready to appear 
 in it which led him to insist upon the actor's 
 substitute retaining his place in the play instead 
 of yielding it to the manager who had apparently 
 repented of his unwillingness. 
 
 This manifest reluctance to bring out the 
 play accords little with the assertion now fre- 
 quently made that Macready was constantly be- 
 seeching the poet to write plays for him to act. 
 This on the surface is improbable, after his pre- 
 vious experience with "StraflFord." It certainly 
 receives no countenance from anything to be 
 found in the actor's own diary. Browning's 
 conduct on this occasion, as he afterward con- 
 fessed, showed ignorance of the proper course to 
 be pursued. But as he himself reports the cir- 
 cumstances, it evinced something more than ig- 
 norance. In the accounts given neither he nor 
 any of his admirers seem to be struck by the as- 
 surance, to call it by the least offensive name, of 
 a dramatic author presuming to dictate to a 
 manager, who chanced also to be the leading 
 English actor of his time, who should take the 
 principal part in a piece brought out at the thea- 
 ter under his direction. To Macready himself 
 it must have seemed unparalleled impudence. 
 
OF ROBERT BROWNING 115 
 
 But, whatever may be the opinion we hold as to 
 the propriety of this action, there can be no dis- 
 pute as to its impolicy. To have a new play 
 brought out at Macready's theater, without Ma- 
 cready in it, was courting failure, no matter 
 whether much or little money was spent on the 
 accompaniments of its representation. 
 
 We are further to bear in mind in discussing 
 this whole story that Macready's side of the dif- 
 ferences which arose has never been given. In 
 his diary there is little recorded beyond the fact 
 that the play appeared. No comment, what- 
 ever, is made upon it. It looks as if all reflec- 
 tions in regard to it or to the incidents connected 
 with its production had been carefully edited out 
 of the work as published. On the other hand. 
 Browning's side has appeared at least twice in 
 what may be called an official form. One of 
 these is in the shape of two private letters written 
 by him in 1884 to the editor of the London Daily 
 News. These were printed in full in Mrs. 
 Sutherland Orr's life of the poet. The other is 
 the "Personalia" of Mr. Gosse which originally 
 came out as a contribution to the Century Maga- 
 zine for December, 1881, but was reprinted in 
 book form in 1890. This, we are assured, "was 
 
Ii6 THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 
 
 inspired and pardy dictated, was revised and ap- 
 proved of by (Browning) himself." It was read 
 by him as published and received an acknowl- 
 edgment implying its correctness. 
 
 These two sources of information may in con- 
 sequence be properly looked upon as the author's 
 own relation of certain incidents in his career. 
 Both are therefore to be treated as of equal valid- 
 ity. There are, indeed, between them one or 
 two irreconcilable discrepancies in regard to 
 particular matters; but in the main the two 
 authorities agree. In the "Personalia" Brown- 
 ing says that he was wont to be amused at the 
 mixture of fact and fable given in what purported 
 to be the story of his life. For it he had doubt- 
 less ample reason: yet the most ill-informed of 
 contemporary biographers never succeeded in 
 furnishing a more misleading report of any event 
 in his career than he did himself in these two 
 authorized accounts of one of his theatrical vent- 
 ures. Southcy used to spend a great deal of 
 his time in explaining why his various epics had 
 never had a sale. The very obvious reason 
 seemed never to occur to him that men did not 
 care to read them and consequently did not buy 
 them. Much after the same fashion Browning 
 
OF ROBERT BROWNING 117 
 
 in his later years used to explain why his dramas 
 had failed upon the stage; or rather he used to 
 insist that they had not failed; that it was due 
 to purely accidental causes that their career of 
 triumph had been prematurely cut short. This 
 was especially true of the fortunes of the tragedy 
 called "A Blot i' the 'Scutcheon." 
 
 Accordingly let us contrast some of the asser- 
 tions about this one play as made by Browning 
 himself in the two authorities just mentioned 
 with the facts as they really occurred. In con- 
 sidering them it is important to keep in mind 
 that Macready closed his engagement at the 
 Haymarket 1 heater on the 7th of December, 
 1 84 1. Before doing so he had agreed to under- 
 take the management of Drury Lane. This 
 position he assumed and held for two seasons. 
 It is evident from both the accounts which come 
 from Browning that these two seasons were com- 
 pletely confused in his own mind. It is the first of 
 which he is thinking; it is of the second he actually 
 speaks. All this comes out distinctly the moment 
 his assertions are compared with the facts. 
 
 Browing tells us that Macready accepted the 
 play of "A Blot i' the 'Scutcheon" while he was 
 engaged at the Haymarket and retained it for 
 
Ii8 THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 
 
 Drury Lane. It was toward the close of 1841 
 — precisely speaking, on the night of December 
 27 — that the actor opened his first season at the 
 latter theater. If the poet's recollections can be 
 trusted, his own play must accordingly have been 
 written some time that year before the beginning 
 of the first of these two seasons. He further 
 tells us that when the season began at the latter 
 theater, the manager informed him that he 
 should produce his play when he had brought 
 out two others — "The Patrician's Daughter" 
 and "Plighted Troth." The former was the 
 work of Westland Marston, the latter of a brother 
 of George Darley. Yet we know from Ma- 
 cready's diary that he never even read the drama 
 entitled "The Patrician's Daughter" until 
 August 29, 1842. He consequently could not 
 have told Browning in 1841 that his own play 
 must wait for one which the manager had never 
 seen, if, indeed, at that time, it had itself an act- 
 ual being. 
 
 Browning tells us that after Macready took 
 Drury Lane under his management he opened it 
 on December 10. The year which he had in 
 mind though not specified could have been no 
 other than 1842. But in neither of his two sea- 
 
OF ROBERT BROWNING 119 
 
 sons did the manager open the theater on that 
 date. As just mentioned, the first began on 
 December 27, 1841; as for the second, it began 
 October i, 1842. Browning also tells us that 
 the season was opened with Marston's "Patri- 
 cian's Daughter." But ''The Patrician's Daugh- 
 ter" was brought out during his second season, 
 not his first. So far, too, was he from beginning 
 this second season with it, that there had been 
 nearly sixty performances before it came on. 
 The date of December lo, 1842, given by him 
 for this particular occurrence, is correct; but it 
 is about the only correct thing to be found in the 
 two accounts for which he is responsible. 
 
 Browning tells us that "The Patrician's 
 Daughter" was removed from the stage to make 
 way for "Plighted Troth." The last repre- 
 sentation of the former play was the 20th of 
 January, 1843. But "Plighted Troth" had 
 been brought out during Macready's first Drury 
 Lane season — precisely speaking, on April 20, 
 1842. Then it was most effectually damned. 
 Though given out for the following night, it 
 seems never to have been heard of again. It 
 hardly needs to be said that neither Marston's 
 play nor that of any one else could have given 
 
THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 
 
 way to one which had disappeared from the stage 
 fully nine months before. 
 
 Browning tells us that "The Patrician's 
 Daughter" had but a moderate success — a suc- 
 cess of esteem, it is phrased. Macready wrote 
 to him that it had failed in money-getting. Still 
 it was acted at least ten times before it was with- 
 drawn. Here it is to be said that under Ma- 
 cready's management an interval of one or more 
 nights — more than one, as a rule — took place be- 
 tween successive performances of the same piece. 
 Browning further gives us to understand that his 
 own play, in spite of the manager's coldness, 
 which had caused it to be maimed and mutilated 
 and deprived of every advantage, was much more 
 than a success of esteem. According to him, it 
 was "a complete success" — as Macready him- 
 self declared it to be. He tells us that it was an- 
 nounced to be played "three times a week until 
 further notice," and, moreover, that it "was per- 
 formed with entire success to crowded houses 
 until the final collapse of Macready's schemes 
 brought it abruptly to a close." This, we are 
 exultingly assured by his devotees, is the true 
 story of a real triumph which erring critics, one 
 after another, have chronicled as a defeat. 
 
OF ROBERT RBOWNING 
 
 To confirm further this view Browning tells 
 us that the play had the usual run. The facts 
 are that it was brought out on Saturday, Febru- 
 ary II, and was further acted on Wednesday 
 and Friday of the week following. Then it was 
 withdrawn permanently. Accordingly it was 
 performed but three nights in all. But not even 
 in the eighteenth century, when there were only 
 two theaters, was three nights the usual run of a 
 successful play. It was a distinct mark of an 
 unsuccessful one. If the fortunes of Marston's 
 play, which held the stage for ten nights, could 
 be termed no more than respectable, what epi- 
 thet ought to be applied to those of the one which 
 lasted through three performances only .? 
 
 Browning tells us his tragedy gave way to Ma- 
 cready's benefit. That benefit took place on 
 Friday, February 24, 1843. ^^^ third and 
 final performance of "A Blot i' the 'Scutcheon," 
 was on Friday, February 17. There was mani- 
 festly no reason on this account for the hurried 
 withdrawal from the stage of a successful piece. 
 Furthermore, during this interval of a week, four 
 plays had been performed. These were "She 
 Stoops to Conquer," "Macbeth," "The Lady 
 of Lyons," and "As You Like It." 
 
122 THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 
 
 Browning tells us that the theater closed a 
 fortnight after Macready's benefit. This asser- 
 tion would have been absolutely correct if for 
 two weeks he had said sixteen. Macready's 
 second Drury Lane season closed on the 14th 
 of June with the performance of "Macbeth." 
 To make the discrepancy of the facts with 
 Browning's statement of the facts still more glar- 
 ing, it is to be added that during this interval 
 of four months the manager had tried his fort- 
 unes with two new plays. One of them was 
 "The Secretary" of the veteran dramatist, James 
 Sheridan Knowles, which was brought out on 
 April 28; and the other the "Athelwold" of Mr. 
 William Smith, which, printed a year before, 
 had been chosen by Miss Faucit for her benefit 
 on May 18. Both plays were received with tu- 
 multuous applause the first night. Both failed 
 to attract audiences. Both were speedily with- 
 drawn. Macready all this time was struggling 
 with pecuniary difficulties. It is not likely that 
 a manager so beset, whatever might be his per- 
 sonal feelings, would risk the chances with two 
 new and untried plays while a third one, with 
 which he could be sure of attracting large audi- 
 ences, was suffered to remain unacted. 
 
OF ROBERT BROWNING 
 
 123 
 
 Browning tells us that until its withdrawal, 
 **A Blot i' the 'Scutcheon" was performed to 
 crowded houses. Contemporary evidence is so 
 far from supporting this assertion that it con- 
 tradicts it absolutely. There is a general agree- 
 ment among the periodicals of all sorts then ap- 
 pearing as to the little favor with which the play 
 was received. One quotation may be given 
 which practically represents the universal opin- 
 ion. This is from the review of the theatrical 
 season just ended which can be found in the 
 London Times oi June 13, 1843. ''On the nth 
 of February," it says, "a three-act play called 
 'A Blot i' the 'Scutcheon' made its appear- 
 ance and was moderately successful the first 
 night while it totally failed in attraction," This 
 is essentially the view taken by the other peri- 
 odicals, not even excluding The Examiner. 
 
 But a feeling seems to prevail among the mod- 
 ern partisans of Browning that anybody who is 
 not wholly for him, not merely in the estimate of 
 his genius but in the account of the incidents of 
 his life, is so much against him that his words can 
 not be trusted at all. Accordingly it may be ad- 
 visable to cite here the testimony of one who at 
 that period belonged to the inner circle of his 
 
124 THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 
 
 personal friends. This man is Joel Arnould, 
 who subsequently went out to India to take the 
 position of Judge of the Supreme Court at Bom- 
 bay. He was equally a friend of another one be- 
 longing to this same circle, that Alfred Domett 
 who was the subject of Browning's poem en- 
 titled "Waring." To him residing then in New 
 Zealand, Arnould, in an undated letter, but mani- 
 festly belonging to 1843, furnished an account of 
 the reception this particular play had met. In it 
 he followed the accepted Browning view, now 
 become traditional, which represents Macready 
 as the devil behind the scenes who was mali- 
 ciously bent on contriving the ruin of a play which 
 thereby would have the effect of contributing fur- 
 ther to his own financial ruin. "He did his best 
 to wreck it," says one of the poet's biographers.^ 
 Arnould gives a description of the first per- 
 formance which I select particularly because it 
 is far more favorable than that contained in 
 any other contemporary record as yet published. 
 "The first night," he wrote, "was magnificent. 
 There could be no mistake about the honest en- 
 thusiasm of the audience. . . . Altogether the 
 first night was a triumph. The second night 
 
 * "Robert Browning," by C. H. Herford, New York, 1905, p. 52. 
 
OF ROBERT BROWNING 125 
 
 was evidently presided over by the spirit of the 
 manager. I was one of about sixty or seventy 
 in the pit, and yet we seemed crowded when com- 
 pared to the desolate emptiness of the boxes. 
 The gallery was again full. The third night I 
 again took my wife to the boxes. It was evident 
 at a glance that it was to be the last. My own 
 delight and hers too in the play was increased 
 at this third representation and would have gone 
 on increasing to a thirtieth; but the miserable 
 great chilly house with its apathy and emptiness 
 produced in us both the painful sensation which 
 made her exclaim that she * could cry with vexa- 
 tion at seeing so noble a play so basely marred.'"^ 
 Yet this enthusiastic friend who could have kept 
 on going to the same performance thirty times 
 pointed out that a new play produced at Ma- 
 cready's theater, with the foremost English actor 
 taking no part in it, was foredoomed to failure. 
 That one fact would suffice to repel numbers. 
 Arnould further conceded that even had Ma- 
 cready taken part, the piece could never have be- 
 come permanently popular. 
 
 I have brought here into sharp contrast Brown- 
 ing's statement of facts about the production of 
 
 * "Robert Browning and Alfred Doniett," p. 66. 
 
126 THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 
 
 "A Blot i' the 'Scutcheon" with the facts as they 
 actually are. Further minor conflicts with the 
 eternal verities; further minor discrepancies be- 
 tween the two accounts for which he is respon- 
 sible, lack of time and space compels me to 
 disregard. In one of the two authorities here fol- 
 lowed he is represented as asserting that he had 
 kept silence for forty years while the stories of the 
 failure of his play were in circulation. It would 
 have been far better had he kept silence the rest 
 of his life. From the intentional false witness 
 of the wicked truth can be protected. How can 
 we shield it from the unintentional false witness 
 of the good .? It is hardly possible to secure bet- 
 ter evidence than that which came from Brown- 
 ing to establish the truth of what is demonstrably 
 false. For he himself was simply incapable of 
 making a statement which he knew to be un- 
 trustworthy, and especially one that would re- 
 dound unjustly to his own credit. Yet we have 
 had here to deal with a tissue of assertions of his, 
 all honestly made and all having no foundation in 
 fact. Yet because they have come from a man 
 of highest character as well as of genius, his par- 
 tisans have exhibited their loyalty at the expense 
 of their judgment in accepting his contradictions 
 
OF ROBERT BROWNING 127 
 
 of previously accepted beliefs not only without 
 question, but without the slightest attempt at 
 verification. It has, indeed, been more than 
 once exultingly proclaimed that these inaccurate 
 assertions furnish proof positive that the com- 
 mon accounts of the ill success of his plays, once 
 current, have received their death-blow and that 
 all inferences derived from their assumed failure 
 must be henceforth treated as erroneous and 
 misleading. 
 
 No one, in truth, who has had occasion to refer 
 to the history of this particular play, seems ca- 
 pable of making an accurate statement about it. 
 From author down to auditor they tell us the 
 most easily exposed untruths with a full convic- 
 tion of their perfect conformity to fact. Let us 
 take two striking illustrations of this condition of 
 things. Mrs. Bridell-Fox, the daughter of the 
 early friend and patron of Browning, gave in The 
 Argosy of February, 1890, an account of the 
 first performance of "A Blot i' the 'Scutcheon." 
 She gave it, to use her own words, as she vividly 
 recalled it. " In the play," she wrote, " Macready 
 took the part of Lord Thorold, the elder brother, 
 on the first night of its representation only. I 
 well remember his noble bearing and dignified 
 
128 THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 
 
 grace. It was, however, produced by him in the 
 later days of his management of Drury Lane, 
 when worn out with fatigue and anxiety, he was 
 unable to sustain the part, and handed it over 
 to Mr. Phelps for the remainder of the nights the 
 play ran." Here is a woman of unquestionable 
 integrity and truthfulness recalling vividly the 
 sight of something which she had never seen at 
 the time specified nor at any time whatever; for 
 Macready never in his life took the part of 
 Thorold Lord Tresham. 
 
 Let us turn to another creation of the imagina- 
 tion, though in this instance based upon a foun- 
 dation of fact. In 1844 Phelps, who was the 
 original Lord Tresham, took upon himself the 
 management of the Sadler's Wells Theater in 
 Islington. There he made a great success, and 
 there he remained nearly a score of years. In 
 the fifth year of his management — specifically in 
 November, 1848 — he revived "A Blot i' the 
 'Scutcheon." His nephew and biographer gave 
 to the Browning Society, in 1888, a glowing ac- 
 count of the favor it met at its reproduction. " It 
 was played," he wrote, "four nights for an en- 
 tire month (the run he usually gave a play pro- 
 duced by him at this period) to large and en- 
 
OF ROBERT BROWNING 129 
 
 thusiastic audiences, as I can testify, having been 
 at the theatre the greatest part of each evening." * 
 This, if true, would make at least sixteen per- 
 formances during the period immediately fol- 
 lowing the revival. Yet records which can not 
 be disputed show that it did not run for a 
 month, but for two weeks only; and that during 
 these two weeks it was acted not four times a 
 week but three. Later in February, 1849, it was 
 acted twice. This made eight performances in 
 all during the whole season.' Here accordingly 
 is testimony given in fullest sincerity by a man 
 present who was in a position peculiarly favora- 
 ble for ascertaining precisely what had occurred. 
 Yet to the truth of what actually occurred, his 
 statements have only a remote relation. If 
 we can not trust his testimony as to the easily 
 verified number of performances given, what 
 confidence can we have in his testimony as to 
 the largeness and enthusiasm of the audience 
 assembled ? The further fact that Phelps did 
 not during his long management produce again 
 
 • Letter of W. May Phelps, dated March 3, 1888. Proceedings 
 of Browning Society, Notes No. 147, p. 243. 
 
 = The play was acted at the Sadler's Wells Theater, Nov. 27, 
 28, and 29; and Dec. 7, 8, 9, in 1848; and on February 2 and 3, 
 
I30 THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 
 
 the piece, in which at its first representation at 
 Drury Lane he was generally regarded as having 
 achieved distinct success, seems to indicate that 
 he did not share in his nephew's view as to the 
 number and zeal of those who were present at 
 this revival. 
 
 There is indeed no question that the play, 
 so far from being the complete success which 
 Browning termed it, was a failure. Such was the 
 view taken of its fortunes in all contemporary 
 notices, whether friendly or hostile. In The 
 Examiner Forster justly praised the tragedy as a 
 work of rare beauty and as unutterably tender 
 and passionate. Still he did not venture to pre- 
 dict for it anything but a short existence on the 
 stage. That it succeeded fairly well the first 
 night may be freely admitted. But the same 
 thing is to be said of many pieces that then failed 
 — in particular of the very two already mentioned 
 which followed it the same season at the same 
 theater. If contemporary evidence can be trust- 
 ed, each of these was received the first night 
 with more enthusiasm than was Browning's 
 play. Yet each failed to attract audiences, each 
 was speedily withdrawn. Their fate was the 
 very one which befell "A Blot i' the 'Scutcheon." 
 
OF ROBERT BROWNING 
 
 131 
 
 At its original performance there was present a 
 strong body of admirers, brought thither by per- 
 sonal regard for the author or impressed by the 
 power and passion displayed in the poetry. But 
 there was also a distinct minority of dissen- 
 tients. We know that even on this first repre- 
 sentation hisses were heard. "The author," 
 says the report in The Times, "was called for at 
 the conclusion, but there was quite enough of 
 disapprobation expressed to account for his un- 
 willingness to appear." 
 
 Up to this point the success of the play has 
 been considered. Enough has been said to 
 show that at its original representation "A Blot 
 i' the 'Scutcheon" was a failure. The further 
 question now arises, Ought it to have been a 
 success } It must be kept in mind that we are 
 not here discussing the work as a contribution 
 to literature, but as an attempt at the dramatic 
 representation of real life. We can concede 
 willingly the fervor and fire and passion which 
 characterize it in numerous places and drew 
 from Dickens his enthusiastic tribute. We can 
 further concede the opportunities which it af- 
 fords and improves for affecting and tragic 
 situations. But we are treating it here simply 
 
132 THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 
 
 as a work of art, as an exemplification of that 
 drama, the aim of which, as its greatest exponent 
 has told us, is to hold the mirror up to nature. 
 This involves as a fundamental consideration 
 the representation of life as it is, and of the men 
 living it conducting themselves in the way we 
 have reason and right to expect. The story 
 taken as the groundwork of the drama may be 
 as unreal and impossible as one found in the 
 Arabian Nights, But that once accepted, what 
 is required is that the personages should act as 
 they would were it probable and true. But in 
 no work produced by any great poet have these 
 principles been more systematically violated, or 
 rather defied, than in the play under discussion. 
 The characters are influenced by motives no one 
 could deem natural. They perform acts no one 
 in his senses would look upon as rational. 
 
 To begin at the beginning, the plot itself of this 
 play, dealing, as it does, with modern feelings 
 and conventions, is something more than in- 
 credible. It outrages all conceptions of the prob- 
 able, not to say the possible. Events that are 
 represented as occurring have undoubtedly oc- 
 curred and perhaps often; but they have never 
 occurred under the conditions here given. There 
 
OF ROBERT BROWNING 
 
 ^33 
 
 is absolute incongruity between the characters 
 of the persons portrayed and their acts. This 
 comes out clearly the moment we detach our- 
 selves from the play considered as literature, and 
 contemplate it as a picture of human life. Take 
 the very initial conception. Mildred, Lord Tres- 
 ham's sister, a young and beautiful girl, has been 
 concerned in a criminal intrigue with the young 
 earl of Merton. They are intending to condone 
 their guilt by marriage. At the veiy outset we 
 have two persons depicted as possessed of the 
 loftiest character and animated by the noblest 
 feelings, furthermore desperately in love with 
 each other, acting in a way that could never have 
 happened in real life, had they been such as they 
 are represented to be. There has been and there 
 is nothing to prevent their union. They both 
 belong to the same station in life. No differ- 
 ences exist between their families. There is 
 no disparity of age. The alliance is not only a 
 natural one, but suitable from every other point 
 of view besides that of mutual love. There is 
 no reason why the hero should not from the out- 
 set have wooed the heroine in the way of honor- 
 able marriage as he is represented as doing at the 
 time the play opens. 
 
134 
 
 THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 
 
 Accordingly it may be fairly asked, why should 
 the two have engaged in an intrigue of this sort ? 
 Why, before being concerned in it, has not this 
 lofty-minded lover applied for the hand of the 
 woman he cherished ? In real life this would 
 have been the inevitable course to follow. In the 
 drama only one reason is given for his failure to 
 take it. In his dying moments the earl tells the 
 man who has slain him that it was fear of him, 
 and of his surpassing reputation, of him the all- 
 courted, the all-accomplished scholar and gentle- 
 man, that has deterred him from presuming to 
 venture upon the daring step of asking for the 
 hand of the woman he loved. Unfortunately this 
 fear had not extended to another member of 
 the family where it would have been much more 
 in place. The timidity which trembled before 
 man's austerity stood in no awe of woman's 
 purity. What had kept him from seeking from 
 the brother that which could have been had for 
 the asking did not prevent him from engaging 
 and succeeding in the effort to overcome the vir- 
 tue of the sister. 
 
 Let us now turn to the other party in the 
 affair. She is portrayed as an embodiment of 
 purity. Such at least she is in the eyes of her 
 
OF ROBERT BROWNING 135 
 
 lover and of her nearest of kin. She is filled 
 with most agonizing remorse for her guilt. Yet 
 no more than her suitor could she have been ig- 
 norant of the fact that there v^ere no insurmount- 
 able obstacles in the v^ay of their union. Cer- 
 tainly the experiment of asking for her hand 
 might have seemed to her well worth trying be- 
 fore sacrificing her honor. A woman perfectly 
 pure at heart can indeed be made the victim of 
 overpowering passion. But she would never be 
 likely to cast aside maidenly reserve and virginal 
 modesty on a slight pretext — least of all, on one 
 so attenuated as this, that her lover felt a certain 
 timidity about making an application for her 
 hand in regular form. 
 
 Had the situation been different; had there 
 existed between the two a passionate love to 
 which circumstances had opposed an impregna- 
 ble barrier; had there been between the families 
 a hostility so bitter that the obstacles raised by 
 mutual enmity were or appeared unsurmount- 
 able; had their positions in life been so different 
 that a proposition of marriage on the part of the 
 suitor would have seemed to her natural guard- 
 ians to partake of the nature of unwarrantable 
 presumption if not of actual insult: in such cir- 
 
136 THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 
 
 cumstances there would have been palliation for 
 the conductor the two in the eyes of the austerest, 
 even though they refused to grant pardon. But 
 not a single one of these mitigating details ex- 
 isted. The only defence the heroine makes for 
 herself is conveyed in the simple phrase, **I had 
 no mother." This, as it appears in the acting, 
 is effective and tragic. But the point to be in- 
 sisted upon in looking at this play as the work of 
 a great dramatic exponent of human nature, and 
 not merely as the work of a great poet, is that had 
 the heroine been really of the character ascribed 
 to her, she would not here have needed a mother. 
 So far from yielding to the solicitations of her 
 lover under the conditions represented as exist- 
 ing, it would have required nothing more than 
 ordinary womanly reserve and purity to repel any 
 proposition of the sort with something more than 
 indignation. To take any other view is an insult 
 to womanhood. 
 
 No argument can explain away this violation 
 of the truth of life, no sophistry can reconcile the 
 action of these two principal personages of the 
 drama with the characters ascribed to them. 
 Had the suitor been the sort of man he is repre- 
 sented to be, he would never have taken advan- 
 
OF ROBERT BROWNING 137 
 
 tage of the innocence and ignorance of a loving 
 and trustful girl. Had in turn the heroine been 
 the sort of woman she is represented to be, the 
 temptation proffered would have been no temp- 
 tation at all. Accordingly their previous con- 
 duct, as depicted by Browning himself, does not 
 give the impression of persons hurried into the 
 commission of sin by the stress of circumstances 
 but rather of a wanton falling into it from the 
 lack of principle. At the very outset therefore 
 we are confronted by the fact that the whole ac- 
 tion of the play hinges upon a situation for the 
 existence of which there is no adequate reason. 
 As if this were not enough, the behavior of the 
 various personages of the drama is equally with- 
 out reason. There is indeed a close consistency 
 between the unreality of the plot and the fatuity 
 of those who are employed to carry it on. The 
 characters act throughout with a defiance of 
 ordinary sense that it is almost impossible to 
 conceive manifested by rational beings in real 
 hfe. 
 
 Let us take one of the early incidents of the 
 play. The lover has overcome his dread of Mil- 
 dred's brother sufficiently to venture to apply for 
 her hand in due form. He has been graciously. 
 
138 THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 
 
 even warmly, received. His addresses have been 
 sanctioned by the head of the house. Nothing 
 more is needed save formal acceptance of them 
 by the woman who has yielded herself to him 
 already. Both therefore are now fully assured 
 that it is in their power to atone, so far as in 
 them Hes, for the past; that henceforth the earl 
 can visit Mildred as her accepted and ac- 
 knowledged lover. Only two days must pass — 
 one day is all that is really necessary — and he 
 can then claim openly, as his promised bride, 
 the woman he loves. Certainly it would seem 
 that during this brief interval they might refrain 
 for the sake of their common future from doing 
 the slightest act that would tend to bring about 
 the revelation of their secret. The meeting in 
 her chamber must always have been hazardous — 
 so hazardous that its having remained so long 
 undiscovered is one of the inherent improbabili- 
 ties of the play which is lost to consideration in 
 the view of the many greater improbabilities 
 which abound in it. But now that perfect safety 
 is in sight, there is surely no need of running fur- 
 ther risk, no justification for it. 
 
 In real life, refraining from such further risk 
 would unquestionably have been the course 
 
OF ROBERT BROWNING 
 
 139 
 
 adopted. In the play the thought of so common- 
 sense a procedure seems never to have occurred 
 to either of the lovers. The earl takes the occa- 
 sion of the night succeeding the day of his ac- 
 ceptance by Mildred's brother to visit Mildred 
 herself in her ow^n chamber. As secrecy was all 
 important, he would, in real life, have made his 
 way to his destined haven in the profoundest 
 silence. Instead he comes singing a song. The 
 stage direction tell us that it is to be sung in as 
 low a voice as possible. But however repressed 
 in the delivery, if it reached the ears of the one to 
 whom it was addressed, it was necessarily liable 
 to reach the ears of others. Therefore, in real 
 life it would never have been sung at all. It was 
 poetry that demanded its utterance, not dra- 
 matic propriety. For it is a beautiful lyric. 
 Too much can not be said in praise of its pas- 
 sionate intensity. Only it is not appropriate to 
 the occasion. In the drama which sets out to 
 represent life as it is, this was the time above all 
 to avoid singing it. 
 
 Furthermore, the song, while not appropriate 
 to the occasion, can not be regarded as altogether 
 appropriate to the characters. It must have 
 grated upon the feelings of some of the audience 
 
I40 THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 
 
 — as a matter of fact we know that on the first 
 night it did — to have the lover about to make a 
 secret midnight visit to the chamber of the hero- 
 ine salute her with its opening line, 
 
 "There's a woman like a dewdrop, she's so purer than the 
 purest." 
 
 Pure at heart she may be conceded to be in spite 
 of all that has happened. It would have been 
 right for her lover to have so assured her in the 
 privacy of the interview. But the song is as 
 much addressed to the audience as it is to her it 
 celebrates. Accordingly the view expressed in 
 it could hardly have been deemed a compliment 
 to the character of the women present. They 
 might justifiably resent having it chanted to 
 them almost defiantly that the girl who is repre- 
 sented as having been concerned in an illicit in- 
 trigue is actually purer than the purest to be 
 found among them. It is no wonder that on 
 the first night of its performance the play came 
 near being wrecked on this particular scene. In 
 spite of the fervor and beauty of the lyric there 
 was manifested among the irreverent scattered 
 through the audience a perceptible disposition to 
 scoff. 
 
OF ROBERT BROWNING 141 
 
 But the untruthfulness of the play as a repre- 
 sentation of real life does not stop at this point. 
 To Lord Tresham is revealed the terrible fact 
 that night after night Mildred has been visited in 
 her chamber by an unknown man. She is re- 
 proached for her course by her agonized brother. 
 She makes no attempt to deny her guilt, but 
 absolutely refuses to disclose the name of her 
 accomplice. At the same time she expresses her 
 willingness to receive the Earl as her affianced 
 bridegroom. Naturally her brother is horrified 
 at the apparent intention to inflict an atrocious 
 wrong upon an unsuspecting suitor, to commit 
 an act which would bring dishonor upon him 
 who suffered it and dishonor of a graver kind 
 upon those who had carried it into execution. 
 One can understand Mildred's refusal to reveal 
 her lover's name, if she had made up her mind 
 to expiate her sin by leading henceforth a life 
 of solitary contrition. But this she has not the 
 slightest thought of doing. So long therefore as 
 she purposes to persist in her determination to 
 marry the man who has offered himself, why not 
 reveal the actual facts of the situation .f* Why 
 not make it known that the applicant for her 
 hand and the nightly visitor to herchamber are 
 
142 THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 
 
 one and the same person ? It is not merely the 
 natural course for her to pursue, in the circum- 
 stances it is the only one; and she resolutely re- 
 fuses to pursue it. 
 
 Several defences have been pleaded for her un- 
 willingness to make a revelation which is morally 
 obligatory if she intends to enter into the pur- 
 posed union. They have been put forth from 
 the point of view of high art, and again from 
 a profound philosophic view of human nature. 
 The moment any one of these is scrutinized, it is 
 felt to be an effort, futile as it is labored, to ex- 
 plain the unexplainable. But looked at from 
 the author's point of view there is no difficulty in 
 accounting for her silence. Had she revealed 
 the name of her lover, the play would have had 
 to come at once to an untimely end, or would 
 have had to be furnished with an entirely dif- 
 ferent denouement. The grossest improbabili- 
 ties were therefore to be accepted to prevent the 
 otherwise inevitable result. 
 
 Take again the . next night. Mildred now 
 knows that her secret has been discovered. She 
 knows in consequence that any attempt to renew 
 the visit to her chamber will be watched and will 
 be watched by hostile eyes. She not only rec- 
 
OF ROBERT BROWNING 143 
 
 ognizes the danger, the author makes us aware 
 that she recognizes it. When Guendolen, who 
 has surprised her secret, mentions the renewed 
 coming of her lover as possible, she exclaims, 
 "he is lost." To prevent this calamity she 
 could certainly have refrained from any act 
 which would have the effect of luring him on to 
 the destruction which in that event she foresees 
 to be certain. In real life not to give the signal 
 for his coming would have been the least thing 
 she could do in order to avert the threatened 
 peril. But in the drama an expedient so simple 
 as this seems not to have occurred to her or to 
 her adviser. So at midnight Mildred proceeds 
 to transfer the lamp from the red square in the 
 pointed glass higher up to the small dark blue 
 pane. This is the appointed signal for her lover 
 to come. He obeys and the result follows which 
 any one above the capacity of an idiot would 
 have foreseen must follow. 
 
 Nor do the other personages of the drama dis- 
 play the qualities which are supposed to charac- 
 terize rational human beings. Guendolen, for 
 instance, is represented as possessing fully a 
 soundness of judgment which is mainly con- 
 spicuous by its absence in the acts of the rest. 
 
144 THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 
 
 She discovers by her own intuitive sagacity that 
 Mildred's midnight visitor and her suitor are 
 one and the same person. She knows that the 
 brother has gone off in an agony o^ desperation 
 and is lost to direct communication. Still she 
 has her own lover, Austin, at command. To a 
 certain extent therefore she is mistress of the 
 situation. But she makes not the slightest effort 
 to utilize the advantage of her position. Now 
 that the truth is known, it is all-important that 
 the earl should not repeat his absurd conduct of 
 the night before in visiting Mildred's chamber. 
 What does she do to prevent this visit ? What 
 effort does she put forth to warn the lover of what 
 she must have recognized as his deadly peril ? 
 None at all. She takes no steps to hinder Mil- 
 dred from setting the signal, she takes no steps 
 to inform the earl of the risk he runs in obeying 
 it. Her lack of resource has its counterpart in 
 the conduct of the head of the house in forcing 
 on the duel after he has learned that his sister's 
 suitor is the real midnight visitor. Though his 
 behavior is more explicable, it is not flattering 
 to his sense. He further contributes an addi- 
 tional luster to his scutcheon by slaying a man 
 who makes, as he recognizes himself, no real 
 
OF ROBERT BROWNING 145 
 
 attempt at defence. This is the final irrational 
 act of a series of irrational acts in which each 
 character has to conduct himself as unnaturally 
 as possible to prevent the play from ending 
 naturally. 
 
 All this violation of the truth of life was 
 apparent to most men at the time, though it 
 occasionally escaped the attention of some of 
 the most keen-sighted. The necessities of the 
 drama at times exact, or at any rate permit, the 
 neglect of probability in the conduct of the char- 
 acters. Still they do not require unhesitating 
 and persistent defiance of it. Yet such is the 
 course unflinchingly followed in this play. The 
 possibility of the existence of the condition of 
 things described in it at its opening puts of itself 
 a suflSciently severe strain upon belief, or rather 
 upon credulity, without the further persistent 
 demands made upon it during the course of the 
 action. As a matter of fact, we are in a world of 
 unreal beings, powerfully portrayed, it is true; for 
 the situations are often exciting, and the pathos 
 of the piece is undeniable to him who can keep 
 out of his mind the preposterous conduct of the 
 characters. But the action all through lies out 
 of the realm of probability, not to say possibility. 
 
146 ROBERT BROWNING 
 
 It is therefore out of the realm of the highest art. 
 So Httle is there of that in it that the tragedy con- 
 sists largely of a series of narrow escapes from 
 arriving at a happy termination, and thereby be- 
 coming a comedy. From this fate nothing could 
 have saved it, if a single one of the leading 
 characters had chosen to act as he or she would 
 have acted in real life. Those who dwell in the 
 rarefied air of the emotional, or rather the hys- 
 terical, may find the behavior of the personages 
 of the play worthy of approbation. Assuredly 
 cold-blooded, hard-headed, and hard-hearted 
 men of the world will feel that people who display 
 so little sense ought to die, for they are not fit 
 to live in any society made up of rational or even 
 semirational beings. 
 
IV 
 "BELLS AND POMEGRANATES" 
 
 "A SOUL'S TRAGEDY"— "LYRICS"— DECLINE AND 
 REVIVAL OF BROWNING'S REPUTATION 
 
 Whatever may be the theoretical estimate 
 privately entertained of the value of Browning's 
 plays in themselves, the facts given in the previ- 
 ous lectures prove beyond dispute that as con- 
 tributions to the acting drama the verdict of the 
 public has never been in their favor. Not one 
 of them has ever attained genuine success on the 
 stage. You may, if you please, attribute this 
 inferiority in drawing power to the superiority 
 these pieces display as literature; though, it must 
 be confessed that this is something of a reflection 
 upon the continuous attraction for theater-goers 
 which Shakespeare, adequately and even inad- 
 equately interpreted, has exerted for more than 
 three centuries. Yet, even as literature most of 
 Browning's plays do not occupy a high rank. 
 Some of them are tender and delicate as is "Co- 
 147 
 
148 THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 
 
 lombe's Birthday"; some of them are tedious as 
 is "Strafford." One of them — "The Return of 
 the Druses" — has the excitement of a starthng 
 denouement. But as a rule they interest the 
 reader as Httle in the closet as those did the hearer 
 which were acted upon the stage. 
 
 To this general criticism there is one excep- 
 tion. I refer to "A Soul's Tragedy," which with 
 *' Luria" made up the eighth and last number of 
 the series of " Bells and Pomegranates." This 
 is a drama which the poet had written two or 
 three years before publication, apparently at 
 a heat. Browning rivalled and even occas- 
 sionally surpassed his most thorough-going parti- 
 sans in the tendency he exhibited to prefer his 
 poorest work to his best. For this particular 
 play he naturally therefore had no great regard — 
 an opinion which need not weigh heavily upon us, 
 coming as it does from one who never ceased to 
 think highly of " Sordello." Before showing the 
 manuscript of it to his future wife, he described 
 it to her as all sneering and disillusion. He was 
 reluctant to print it; indeed, he was perfectly 
 ready to destroy it and assured her in the fullest 
 sincerity that if she said the word, it should be 
 burned. 
 
OF ROBERT BROWNING 149 
 
 In truth, it gives one a most puzzling idea of 
 Browning's mental processes to find that he 
 thought this drama, which is conspicuous among 
 his works for its clearness, was so obscure — so 
 much more obscure than " Luria," for instance — 
 that he declared that if the latter was dearishy 
 the printing of the former would be an unneces- 
 sary troubling of the waters. He re-read it in 
 February, 1846. His previous impressions about 
 it were then fully confirmed. In consequence, 
 he hesitated about including it in the series 
 of "Bells and Pomegranates." Though there 
 were several points in it which struck him as suc- 
 cessful in design and execution, he came to the 
 conclusion that it would be preferable to post- 
 pone its publication. Subject-matter and style, 
 he thought, were alike unpopular. This was 
 true, he said, even "for the literary grex that 
 stands aloof from the purer plehs, and uses that 
 privilege to display and parade an ignorance 
 which the other is altogether unconscious of."* 
 He was therefore disposed to reserve from publi- 
 cation, for the time being, this unlucky play, as 
 he called it. In the case of a possible second 
 
 * "Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett," New 
 York, 1899, vol. I, p. 470. 
 
I50 THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 
 
 edition of the series it could then be quietly in- 
 serted in its proper place. 
 
 Great therefore was Miss Barrett's astonish- 
 ment when the work was submitted to her for 
 perusal. She was almost disposed to be indig- 
 nant with its author for misleading her, " Now," 
 she wrote, "I shall know what to believe when 
 you talk of very bad and indifferent doings of 
 yours." ^ She recognized at once the great ex- 
 cellence of the play. The correspondence be- 
 tween the two makes it clear that at heart she 
 preferred it to " Luria," though she felt bound to 
 defer sufficiently to her lover's judgment to accord 
 to the latter a nominal superiority. But even so 
 much concession as this was wrung from her, 
 rather than cheerfully granted. **It is a work," 
 she wrote, '*full of power and significance, and 
 I am not at all sure (not that it is wise to make 
 comparisons, but that I want you to understand 
 how I am impressed!) — I am not at all sure that 
 if I knew you now first and only by these two 
 productions — 'Luria' and 'The Tragedy' — I 
 should not involuntarily attribute more power 
 and a higher faculty to the writer of the last." ^ 
 
 '"Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett," New 
 York, 1899, vol. I, p. 540. 
 ^ Ibid., vol.11, p. 13. 
 
OF ROBERT BROWNING 151 
 
 In the conflict that went on between the duty 
 of heeding her own judgment and the desire that 
 urged her to defer to the taste of her lover, she 
 felt compelled to qualify this admission. "Yet 
 'Luria' is the completer work — I know it very 
 well," she added. Under the circumstances, it 
 would be unjust to reckon up against her this in- 
 dulgence in a mild form of mendacity. 
 
 The more familiar Miss Barrett became with 
 the play, the more she was impressed with its 
 vividness and vitality. She could at first hardly 
 forgive Browning for terrifying her about its 
 poorness and its obscurity. "The worst thing 
 is," she WTOte, "that I half believed you, and 
 took the manuscript to be something inferior — 
 for you — and the advisableness of its publica- 
 tion a doubtful case." ^ Later she gave renewed 
 expression to her opinion. " It delights me," she 
 wrote, "and must raise your reputation as a 
 poet and thinker — must." ^ Browning himself 
 was perfectly sincere in his depreciatory estimate 
 of the work. He was equally sincere in the sur- 
 prise he expressed at the liking she manifested 
 for it. Fortunately this liking compelled its pub- 
 lication at the time. Unfortunately it was not 
 
 > " Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett," New 
 York, 1899, vol. I, p. 541. ^ Ibid., vol. II, p. 34. 
 
152 THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 
 
 permitted to precede "Luria" in the number 
 in which it was printed, and suffered then and 
 perhaps has always suffered since from the in- 
 fluence of that somewhat depressing forerunner. 
 As it further presents no difficulties of compre- 
 hension or construction, as it is a faithful por- 
 trayal of human nature, the poor opinion which 
 Browning entertained of it has extended to many 
 of his devotees, some of whom seem hardly 
 aware of its existence. 
 
 "A Soul's Tragedy" deserves fully the praise 
 which Miss Barrett gave it. Of all the dramatic 
 writings of Browning, it is the one that unites 
 consistency of plot with clearness of expression 
 and a course of action that follows a line of nat- 
 ural development and is, therefore, in full accord- 
 ance with the truth of life. The characters in it 
 are characters we can all understand and appre- 
 ciate. They are acted upon by influences we all 
 recognize as potent, they are swept along by im- 
 pulses which are daily affecting the lives of those 
 about us. The general deterioration in conduct 
 and motive of the hero, which constitutes the 
 tragedy of the play, is the inevitable outcome to 
 be expected of a character which had raised be- 
 fore itself an ideal up to which it was not fitted 
 
OF ROBERT BROWNING 153 
 
 to live; and its lofty pretension contrasted with 
 its pitiful performance hardly needs to be accent- 
 uated by the cynical words of the papal legate, 
 cool, sarcastic, piercing at a glance the shallow 
 nature which strove to persuade itself that it was 
 animated by high purposes. From the very out- 
 set of his appearance he intimates the inevitable 
 failure and dishonor which are to wait upon the 
 man who assumes the attitude of a lover of his 
 country, while all the time he is eaten up with 
 love of himself. 
 
 Before taking leave of the plays, it may be well 
 to note that Browning, in no respect a follower 
 of any school, in many respects a law unto him- 
 self, in his method of expression almost defiantly 
 free from the trammels of the conventional — that 
 Browning of all men should have been the only 
 great writer of our day, at all events of our race, 
 to deliver himself of his own accord into the 
 bondage of the unities, and if not to accept fully 
 that antiquated superstition, to be profoundly 
 affected by it. He did not observe it indeed in 
 his first play; he sometimes strained its require- 
 ments in his later ones; but in his secret soul he 
 had a distinct hankering after it. It was some- 
 times impossible to carry through the action of 
 
154 THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 
 
 his drama within the Hmits required by this doc- 
 trine. Accordingly, he divided into two parts 
 — as in "King Victor and King Charles" and 
 in "A Soul's Tragedy" — what is really one 
 play. So an artificial unity is gained at the 
 expense of a natural one; for in each of these 
 parts the action is limited to a single day. But 
 this is really a concession to an outworn creed 
 rather than the observance of any principle of 
 art — for the plays as they are, are organic wholes, 
 and neither part has any justification for its own 
 existence without the existence of the other. In 
 the case of "The Return of the Druses," " Co- 
 lombe's Birthday," and " Luria " the action in 
 each instance is limited to one day and one place. 
 In "A Blot i' the 'Scutcheon" the stress of cir- 
 cumstances compels the extension of the time 
 somewhat beyond the prescribed twenty-four 
 hours. In general, the difficulties in which he 
 involves himself by encumbering his motions 
 with these fetters have been successfully sur- 
 mounted; though in certain of them, and espec- 
 ially so in "Luria," there is always present to the 
 mind the perpetually recurring flaw in the ob- 
 servance of the unities, the moral impossibility 
 of the events taking place in the limited time in 
 
OF ROBERT BROWNING 155 
 
 which they are described as happening, and too 
 often the physical impossibihty. Why Browning 
 should have voluntarily entered into a bondage 
 which France had then flung off", it is not easy 
 to say. 
 
 So much for the plays. But in the series of 
 *' Bells and Pomegranates" were two parts 
 which have done more to make Browning's 
 name a household word than perhaps nearly all 
 his other poetry combined — at least, not more 
 than one exception can be found in his later pro- 
 duction. These two were the sixteen pages of 
 "Dramatic Lyrics "which made up No. Ill, and 
 the twenty-four pages of " Dramatic Romances 
 and Lyrics " which made up No.VIL The former 
 contained some of the best-known minor poems. 
 These gave at the time to those who were begin- 
 ning to lose faith in him a renewed assurance that 
 his poetic power was of the highest quality, and 
 needed only right direction to place him in the 
 very front rank of authors then living. Forster's 
 review in The Examiner of the first of these two 
 numbers is so clear a proof of the harm which 
 had been wrought to his reputation by the work 
 upon which he had prided himself, that a few 
 sentences of it are worth quoting. "If poetry," 
 
156 THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 
 
 he wrote, "were exactly the thing to grind pro- 
 fessors of metaphysics on, we should pray to Mr. 
 Browning for perpetual 'Sordellos.' As it is, we 
 are humble enough and modest enough to be 
 more thankful for * Dramatic Lyrics.' The col- 
 lection before us is welcome for its own sake, and 
 more welcome for the indication of the poet's 
 advance in a right direction. Some of this we 
 saw and thanked him for in his ' Victor and 
 Charles,' much more in his delightful 'Pippa 
 Passes,' and in the simple and manly strain of 
 some of these 'Dramatic Lyrics' we find proof of 
 the firmer march and steadier control. We were 
 the first to hail his noble start in 'Paracelsus'; 
 the 'Strafford' and 'Sordello' did not shake 
 our faith in him; and we shall see him reach the 
 goal." ' 
 
 In this collection appeared that favorite poem 
 for children as well as for persons of riper growth, 
 "The Pied Piper of Hamelin." It had been 
 written in May, 1842, for Macready's child. It 
 is manifest that Brownino; himself either did 
 not think much of it, or that he believed that it 
 was not likely to increase his reputation. It was 
 added at the last moment only because there were 
 
 * Examiner, Nov. 26, 1843. 
 
OF ROBERT BROWNING 157 
 
 some columns that had to be filled up for this 
 particular number. It is under the circum- 
 stances a singular coincidence that "Lady Gerald- 
 ine's Courtship," one of the most popular pieces 
 by his future wife, was written at a heat to meet 
 corresponding and similar unpoetical conditions. 
 This same part also included several of his con- 
 trasted pieces of which the two entitled ''Camp" 
 and "Cloister" are perhaps the most familiar to 
 readers. Here likewise appeared some perpet- 
 ual favorites as "In a Gondola," "Waring," 
 and "Through the Metidja to Abdel Kader." 
 Indeed, there was hardly a piece in it not 
 worth reading and remembering. 
 
 But fine as was this collection, it was even 
 surpassed by the seventh number of the series, 
 which bore as its title "Dramatic Romances and 
 Lyrics." There are very few individual books 
 of any author in our tongue which contain so 
 many pieces of such sustained excellence. By 
 Browning himself it was never surpassed as a 
 whole. Outside certainly of the later collection 
 entitled "Men and Women," no volume of his 
 ever appealed to so wide a circle of readers of 
 different tastes and temperaments. Six of the 
 poems appearing in it had been published previ- 
 
158 THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 
 
 ously. Browning for some reason was always 
 averse to bringing out his work in periodicals. 
 Gratitude to Fox had induced him to contribute 
 some of his early pieces to the Monthly Reposi- 
 tory. He was now again led to overcome his dis- 
 like to this method of publication because of the 
 sympathy he felt for the misfortunes of a fellow 
 craftsman. Thomas Hood, already under the 
 shadow of death, had established at the begin- 
 ning of 1844 a magazine which bore his own 
 name. Before six months had gone by, hemor- 
 rhage of the lungs had brought him almost to the 
 grave. Though he rallied subsequently to some 
 extent, he broke down completely at the end of 
 the year and never left his bed till in May, 1845, 
 he was taken from it to his tomb. In this condi- 
 tion of things, several friends of the dying man 
 had come to his aid. Among these was Brown- 
 ing. During the year preceding Hood's death he 
 contributed several pieces to his magazine. The 
 last of these which appeared in the number for 
 April, 1845, '^^^ "The Flight of the Duchess"; 
 for with the death of the editor, the following 
 month, the poet felt himself relieved from any 
 further obligation. 
 
 It was part only of **The Flight of the Duch- 
 
OF ROBERT BROWNING 159 
 
 ess " which was then printed — exactly speaking, 
 the first nine stanzas of the completed poem 
 which now includes sixteen in all. Not till the 
 publication of the "Dramatic Romances and 
 Lyrics" was added the part containing the hunt 
 and the scene with the gipsy. Curiously enough, 
 we know from Browning's own words that not a 
 line of this production as it first appeared, was 
 written as he originally intended to write it. 
 "As I conceived the poem," he said, "it con- 
 sisted entirely of the Gipsy's description of the 
 life the Lady was to lead with her future Gipsy 
 lover — a real life, not an unreal one like that with 
 the Duke. And as I meant to write it, all their 
 wild adventures would have come out and the 
 insignificance of the former vegetation have been 
 deducible only — as the main subject has become 
 now." ^ For one I confess to being delighted 
 that Browning was somehow prevented from 
 carrying out his original intention; that the de- 
 scription of the unreal life with the Duke has 
 been actually portrayed, and has not to be de- 
 duced from something else; for the vivid de- 
 scription of it given by himself is worth far more 
 
 * "Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett," New 
 York, 1899, vol. I, p. 139. 
 
i6o THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 
 
 than all the deductions that could have been 
 made by all the members of all the Browning 
 societies that ever have existed or ever will exist. 
 Few there are of the nineteen pieces — or if the 
 contrasted poems be counted separately — of the 
 twenty-four pieces which constitute this collec- 
 tion that are unfamiliar not merely to special 
 students of Browning, but to all lovers of Eng- 
 lish literature. They were shown to Miss Bar- 
 rett in proof. ^ Their beauty and power sur- 
 prised even her, disposed as she was to admire, 
 and ready to find things admirable. "Now," 
 she wrote, "if people do not cry out about these 
 poems, what are we to think of the world ?" 
 That they should cry out there was no question; 
 that they would cry out, there was every reason 
 to expect; that they did not cry out, we know. 
 There was even more than lack of appreciation; 
 there was sometimes positive condemnation. 
 Along with the censure of some professional re- 
 viewers, indeed, praise was bestowed upon them 
 by others; but it was always praise accom- 
 panied with qualifications. Still notice of them, 
 favorable or unfavorable, had little weight with 
 the public. Working against Browning's rep- 
 
 ' " Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett," New 
 York, 1899, vol. I, p. 252. 
 
OF ROBERT BROWNING i6i 
 
 utation was the indifference which I have previ- 
 ously pointed out as being something far more 
 baleful than hostile criticism. If people had only 
 been willing to read, they could not have failed 
 to cry out; but they simply refused to read. 
 
 It is in truth hard for us now to comprehend 
 how low for a long tim.e was the estimate taken of 
 Browning's achievement; how small was the cir- 
 culation of his writings, especially in his own 
 country; and how completely his reputation was 
 then overshadowed by that of his wife. Mrs. 
 Browning died in June, 1861. She is now as un- 
 duly depreciated as she was then unduly ex- 
 alted; for up to the day of her death and for a 
 number of years after she stood far higher in 
 the estimation of the reading pubHc than did 
 her husband. This was true even of America, 
 where his poetry met with much greater favor 
 than it did in his own land. A singular and 
 striking proof of how much larger was the meas- 
 ure she filled even here in the public eye deserves 
 mention. Poe was not only one of the acutest 
 of critics then living, but he had exceptional 
 acquaintance with contemporary literature. In 
 his review of Miss Barrett's volumes of 1844, he 
 accorded to her superiority over every poet then 
 
1 62 THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 
 
 living with the single exception of Tennyson. 
 One, indeed, would almost infer from his words 
 that of her future husband he either knew noth- 
 ing or thought httle. ''That Miss Barrett," he 
 wrote, "has done more in poetry than any wom- 
 an living or dead, will scarcely be questioned; 
 and that she has surpassed all of her poetical 
 contemporaries of either sex (with a single ex- 
 ception) is our deliberate opinion — not idly enter- 
 tained, we think, nor founded on any visionary 
 basis." 
 
 At the preference exhibited by readers for the 
 poetry of his wife. Browning did not grieve. 
 There were a few who then ranked him much 
 above her; but in that limited number he was not 
 himself included. He fully agreed with the gen- 
 eral public as to the superiority of her work to 
 his own. Doubtless his intense affection blinded 
 his judgment; for there can be no question as to 
 his sincerity. "The true creative power is hers, 
 not mine," he said. In the abounding love and 
 admiration he felt for her, and in his generous 
 and unselfish devotion to the extension of her 
 name and fame, he was perfectly content to take 
 a second place in the estimation of the public. 
 But what he resented and what he had a right 
 
OF ROBERT BROWNING 163 
 
 to resent was that he was accorded no place at 
 all. In England the ignorance of his work and 
 the poor opinion there entertained of it at that 
 time seems now almost incredible. Not but in 
 the worst of days he received that lofty praise 
 from the few which is the sure forerunner of the 
 large praise of the many. But among the many 
 who gave him no recognition were comprised 
 then the great majority of the most highly edu- 
 cated class. It included even those distinguished 
 in letters. One can understand and forgive the 
 neglect of certain of his productions. But not 
 to these alone did men at that time turn a deaf 
 ear. They turned as deaf a one to the magnifi- 
 cent pieces which had already been brought out 
 and to others to be brought out later during the 
 period of his unpopularity. 
 
 The proof of this condition of things does not 
 consist merely in the small sale his works then 
 had; though necessarily that is evidence not to 
 be gainsaid or undervalued. Not one of his in- 
 dividual volumes ever went then into a second 
 edition. It is, however, the incidental remarks 
 of persons of high literary and social position that 
 give us fuller glimpses of the absolute failure 
 of Browning's contemporaries to -recognize his 
 
i64 THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 
 
 greatness as a poet. One or two pieces of testi- 
 mony may be worth citing. Mary Russell Mit- 
 ford was an intimate friend of Miss Barrett. In 
 1846 she wrote to a correspondent an account of 
 her marriage to Browning. After speaking of 
 the genius of the wife she went on to discourse in 
 the following way of the husband. "He is a 
 poet also," she said, "but I beheve that his ac- 
 quirements are more remarkable than his poetry, 
 though that has been held to be of high prom- 
 ise." ' 
 
 This was the sort of lukewarm appreciation 
 which Browning received from even the most 
 favorably disposed of the cultivated class, and 
 that too after the series of "Bells and Pomegran- 
 ates" had been published. Furthermore, the 
 ignorance of him and the indifference to him 
 seem to have increased as the years went by, 
 instead of diminishing. The meager returns of 
 sale furnished by his publishers Chapman and 
 Hall, point very unmistakably to this fact. But 
 we have even more direct evidence. In i860 
 the noted philanthropist, Frances Power Cobbe, 
 was staying at Florence. There she was in con- 
 stant contact with the Brownings. While she felt 
 
 * "Life of Mary Russell Mitford," London 1870, vol. Ill, p. 204. 
 
OF ROBERT BROWNING 165 
 
 the highest admiration for the literary achieve- 
 ment of the wife, we have her own testimony that 
 it never occurred to her or to any of her circle of 
 associates that the husband was a poet worth 
 considering. In her autobiography she records 
 the obtuseness of herself and her friends. "At 
 that time," she says, "I do not think that any 
 one, certainly no one of the society which sur- 
 rounded him, thought of Mr. Browning as a great 
 poet, or as an equal one to his wife, whose ' Au- 
 rora Leigh' was then a new book. The utter un- 
 selfishness and generosity wherewith he gloried 
 in his wife's fame perhaps helped to blind us, 
 stupid that we were! to his own claims." ^ 
 
 We know now that Browning felt keenly the 
 injustice with which he was treated. We learn 
 much about his attitude from his wife's corre- 
 spondence. Her resentment of the neglect he 
 experienced was greater than his own; at least 
 it has reached us more definitely. "To you," 
 she wrote to Browning's sister in i860, "I may 
 say, that the blindness, deafness, and stupidity 
 of the English public to Robert are amazing. 
 Robert is. All England can't prevent his exist- 
 ence, I suppose. But nobody there, except a 
 
 » "Life of Frances Power Cobbe," Boston, 1890, vol. II, p. 343. 
 
1 66 THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 
 
 small knot of pre-RafFaelite men, pretends to do 
 him justice. Mr. Forster has done the best in 
 the press. As a sort of lion, Robert has his range 
 in society, and, for the rest, you should see Chap- 
 man's returns; while in America, he's a power, 
 a writer, a poet. He is read — he lives in the 
 hearts of the people." The contrast between 
 the estimate in which she and her husband were 
 held in their own country and the feeling enter- 
 tained about them in this, she expressed with 
 a good deal of bitterness. " For the rest," she 
 continued, "the English hunt lions too, but their 
 favorite lions are chosen among 'lords' chiefly, 
 or 'railroad kings.' 'It's worth eating much 
 dirt,' said an Englishman of high family and 
 
 character here, 'to get to Lady 's soiree.' 
 
 Americans will eat dirt to get to us. There's the 
 difference." ^ 
 
 A year later Mrs. Browning records an instance 
 of the ignorance prevailing about her husband 
 and his work which, did it come from any other 
 source than herself, it would be hard to credit. 
 It occurs in a letter sent to her sister-in-law from 
 Rome in 1 86 1. In it she speaks again of the atti- 
 
 ' " Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning," New York, 1898, vol. 
 II, p. 370. 
 
OF ROBERT BROWNING 167 
 
 tude of his countrymen toward her husband and 
 his sense of its injustice. "His treatment in 
 England," she wrote, "affects him naturally — 
 and for my part I set it down as an infamy of that 
 public — no other word. He says he has told 
 you some things you had not heard, and which, 
 I acknowledge, I always try to prevent him from 
 repeating to any one. I wonder if he has told 
 you besides (no, I fancy not) that an English 
 lady of rank, an acquaintance of ours (observe 
 that!) asked, the other day, the American Minis- 
 ter whether Robert was not an American. The 
 Minister answered, "Is it possible that you ask 
 me this? Why, there is not so poor a village in 
 the United States where they would not tell you 
 that Robert Browning was an Englishman, and 
 that they were very sorry that he was not an 
 American.' Very pretty of the American Minis- 
 ter — was it not } — and literally true besides." ^ 
 
 Undoubtedly the popularity of Browning in 
 this country was exaggerated by his wife to give 
 point to the contrast. But there is no question 
 that the reading public in England remained 
 for a long time scandalously indifferent to his 
 
 ' ''Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning," New York, 1898, 
 vol. II, p. 436. 
 
1 68 THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 
 
 achievement and showed but slight appreciation 
 of its greatness. The fact of the neglect must be 
 conceded. Is there any explanation of it, any 
 palliation for it } Is there in particular any 
 ground for the charge of unnecessary and wilful 
 obscurity of meaning and harshness of versifica- 
 tion, which whether really existing or merely 
 asserted to exist militated constantly against the 
 acceptance of the poet as poet ? Browning him- 
 self was from the beginning well aware of his 
 reputation for lack of clearness. In a letter sent 
 in April, 1845, to his future wife he remarked that 
 something he had written to her previously was 
 "pretty sure to meet the usual fortune of my 
 writings — ^you will ask what it means," At times 
 this complaint of obscurity afforded him matter 
 for jest. He was fond of repeating a remark of 
 Wordsworth about his marriage to Miss Barrett. 
 "I hope," said the veteran poet, "that these young 
 people will make themselves intelligible to each 
 other, for neither of them will ever be intelligible 
 to anybody else." The woman soon to be his 
 wife admitted her own liability to this charge of 
 obscurity. Occasionally too she herself found 
 her future husband unintelligible. "People say 
 of you and me," she wrote to him in the begin- 
 
OF ROBERT BROWNING 169 
 
 ning of their acquaintance, "that we love the 
 darkness and use a Sphinxine idiom in our talk." 
 She went on to make a personal application of 
 this view to something which he had been writ- 
 ing to her. "Really," she said, "you do talk a 
 little like a Sphinx." * 
 
 But Browning, though in a modified way he 
 conceded his obscurity, denied that it was inten- 
 tional. Occasionally, indeed, he resented an 
 accusation of this sort. "I can have but little 
 doubt," he remarked in a private letter belong- 
 ing to 1868, "but that my writing has been, in 
 the main, too hard for many I should have been 
 pleased to communicate with; but I never de- 
 signedly tried to puzzle people, as some of my 
 critics have supposed." ^ Later, in 1872, in the 
 preface to the selection then published of his 
 poetical works, he declared himself innocent of 
 "the charge of being wilfully obscure, uncon- 
 scientiously careless and perversely harsh." 
 There is indeed, no justification for the belief 
 that these faults were intentional; but though 
 unintentional, that they might be and were un- 
 
 ' "Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett," vol. I, 
 
 P- S2>- 
 
 ^"Letters of Robert Browning," London, privately printed, 
 1895, vol. I, p. 26. 
 
lyo THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 
 
 necessary, it never entered his mind to conceive; 
 for while he did not purpose to be obscure, he 
 felt under no obligation to strive to make himself 
 intelligible, at least easily intelligible. 
 
 In a further passage of the privately printed 
 letter just cited, Browning exhibited his utter 
 inability to comprehend the nature of the prob- 
 lem which even the greatest of geniuses must 
 solve who desires the suffrages of the public. " I 
 never pretended," he wrote, "to offer such litera- 
 ture as should be a substitute for cigars or a game 
 of dominoes to an idle man." The self-suffi- 
 ciency of this view is as astounding as its futility. 
 He may not so have intended it; but it is the 
 natural, almost the inevitable inference from the 
 words, that those who gave him up because they 
 found him difficult to comprehend must belong 
 to the class who look upon literature as merely 
 the amusement of an idle hour. At times, in- 
 deed, one gets the impression from some of his 
 utterances that he was almost disposed to resent 
 having said anything that could be understood 
 at once. This is indeed a view largely taken by 
 his disciples. But if they do not know it, Brown- 
 ing himself could hardly have failed to see that 
 no charges of such a nature have been brought 
 
OF ROBERT BROWNING 171 
 
 against poets as great as he and even greater. 
 For instance, no one has found fault for a reason 
 of this sort with Chaucer or Milton or Words- 
 worth. No one further ever spoke or thought of 
 their poetry as a substitute for a cigar or a game 
 of dominoes. 
 
 The subject is so important and the treatment 
 of it has often been so confused that it may be 
 well to have the nature of this problem distinctly 
 presented. Obscurity in an author arises from 
 two causes. It may be owing first to the novelty, 
 depth or loftiness of his speculations which either 
 range outside of the common track, or ascend to 
 regions up to which the ordinary intellect finds 
 it difficult to follow. Clearness of comprehen- 
 sion always assumes, too, a certain amount of 
 special knowledge or a certain degree of mental 
 development on the part of the hearer or reader. 
 What to one man may require the most labored 
 explanation and then be only imperfectly under- 
 stood, may convey its meaning to another at a 
 glance. As the current of our life deepens and 
 broadens, as it absorbs into itself new experiences 
 and new sensations, as it gains new perceptions 
 and enters into new states of mind, things which 
 once seemed vague or incomprehensible come to 
 
172 
 
 THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 
 
 Stand out before us in distinctest outline. They 
 do so because they express precisely what we 
 have at last come to learn or to feel. Through 
 mental growth or perhaps more often through 
 sad experience meanings previously obscure are 
 clearly revealed to the inner consciousness. 
 
 This is to say that we always have to be pre- 
 pared, intellectually or morally, for what we re- 
 ceive. The greatness of Shakespeare grows upon 
 us as we advance in years, because we find in 
 him so much that in earlier days we had passed 
 over without regard or comprehension for the 
 reason that it was beyond the reach of our intel- 
 lects or outside of the lessons of our experience. 
 Accordingly, that in any given instance we did not 
 or do not enter into the full meaning of his words 
 or of those of any other profound writer, is no 
 more an argument against the art or genius dis- 
 played or the clearness and intelligibility of its 
 utterance than the inability of a child to under- 
 stand a philosopher is proof that he is incom- 
 prehensible; or of a beginner in mathematics to 
 understand the integral calculus is satisfactory 
 evidence that it is absurd. Either the intellect 
 is not sufficiently developed, or the requisite pre- 
 liminary knowledge of the subject treated is 
 
OF ROBERT BROWNING 173 
 
 lacking; or both these may contribute to the fail- 
 ure to perceive. In such cases the writer must 
 not merely seem obscure, he must be obscure. 
 But in neither case is it any fault of his own. 
 
 But there is another kind of obscurity arising 
 from the inabihty or neglect of the author to 
 render himself intelligible. The thought, as he 
 has come to see it, may strike him as perfectly 
 clear; but he fails to fulfil the first duty of a 
 writer, which is to take mentally the place of the 
 reader whom he addresses; to have distinctly 
 in his mind how what has been uttered will ap- 
 pear to him who necessarily lacks the subtle 
 chain of association which in his own case has 
 connected thought and expression. That which 
 has come uninvited to the one in flashes of in- 
 spiration must be supplied to the other by the 
 agency of reflection and study. All exertion of 
 this kind which is unnecessary ought to be spared 
 to the reader. The author who is unwilling to 
 perform his duty in this respect has no right to 
 complain when those, even of highest cultiva- 
 tion, refuse to do for him the labor which he 
 has no business to impose. In a world full of 
 choicest literature that is comprehensible, it is 
 inevitable that men will meet the difficulty of 
 
174 THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 
 
 understanding such a writer by the easy device 
 of not reading him. 
 
 In Browning's case the obscurity is due to the 
 operation of both these agencies. Both have 
 acted and will continue to- act as hindrances to 
 familiarity with his writings and consequently to 
 the extension of his popularity. There is no 
 question as to his profound intellectual power. 
 He was, as Tennyson called him, "the greatest- 
 brained poet in England." He therefore de- 
 mands special study. He demands it the more 
 because it is not depth of thought which so pe- 
 culiarly characterizes his utterance as its many- 
 sidedness and unexpectedness. The entirely 
 novel point of view from which old ideas are 
 presented, the entirely new light in which things 
 familiar are made to show themselves, these con- 
 stantly impress the mind and not infrequently 
 startle it, utterly overthrowing, as they do, all pre- 
 conceived opinion. Yet the moment any one of 
 these revelations is brought fully to our knowl- 
 edge, we feel something more than its justness. 
 The sense of its obviousness comes over us at 
 the same time. Though we should never have 
 dreamed of it ourselves, we are, none the less, 
 surprised that it has not occurred to us. 
 
OF ROBERT BROWNING 
 
 175 
 
 Out of many illustrations let us take for ex- 
 amples three such well-known poems as "The 
 Glove," and "Clive," and "Bishop Blougram's 
 Apology." In the first the suitor leaps into the 
 arena full of hungry wild beasts and at the risk 
 of his life picks up the glove his mistress has 
 purposely dropped. He secures it, returns in 
 safety, and flings it in her face. We sympathize 
 at first with the act of the man in thus publicly 
 rebuking the heartless selfishness of the woman 
 who exposes her lover to the needless risk of 
 death for the sake of gratifying her vanity. But 
 how unexpectedly and yet convincingly the poet 
 shows the woman's intention to test and reveal 
 the shallowness of the devotion professed by the 
 suitor who avows his readiness to run all con- 
 ceivable risks for her sake and then resents being 
 called upon to do no more than the poor captors 
 of the beasts are willing to encounter for a mere 
 pittance of money. 
 
 Take again the duel between Clive and the 
 officer whose cheating at cards he has denounced. 
 We admire the courage of the young clerk who 
 looks death defiantly in the face, but refuses 
 to retract his accusation. To Browning alone 
 could have occurred the recognition of the 
 
176 THE EARLY LITERERY CAREER 
 
 ground which the conscience-stricken gamester 
 could have assumed; and instead of doing as he 
 did, of what he could have said but did not say; 
 but which if he had said would, as Clive himself 
 confesses, have left him no other alternative than 
 to atone for his accusation by taking his own life. 
 Or consider the conversation or rather mono- 
 logue in which Bishop Blougram discusses the 
 question of faith with Gigadibs, the literary man, 
 who had publicly doubted the former's genuine 
 acceptance of the belief he avowed and preached. 
 One can not well get rid of the feeling that in this 
 marvellous piece of dialectics there is lurking a 
 fallacy. The poet himself implies it in his final 
 words. But to most of us it is a feeling, not 
 a conviction. To the ordinary intellect there 
 seems no escape from the remorseless logic with 
 which the great bishop rolls out his mind and 
 overwhelms Gigadibs. There are those indeed 
 who profess to have unravelled the strands of 
 falsehood which are interwoven with the truth 
 in this remarkable poem; but they have done 
 little else than reveal their inability to answer 
 difficulties whose existence they do not per- 
 ceive. They seem possessed by the belief that 
 denunciation of Blougram's motives and char- 
 
OF ROBERT BROWNING 177 
 
 acter is an all-sufficient answer to his reason- 
 ing. 
 
 For the sake of the numerous surviving mem- 
 bers of the never-dying family of Gigadibses, I 
 can not but regret that Browning was not led to 
 set forth in another poem the opposite point of 
 view. A criticism of the work in which this par- 
 ticular piece occurred came out in a Roman 
 Catholic review not long after its publication. 
 It was thought by the poet to have been written 
 by Bishop Blougram himself, that is by Cardinal 
 Wiseman. ^ The ascription of it to him is a good 
 deal more than doubtful; in fact it is highly im- 
 probable. But while the Cardinal's authorship 
 of it would assuredly add to the interest taken by 
 the reader, it would add little to the interest of 
 what was written. The reviewer termed this 
 poem satirical and impertinent. He resented the 
 unworthy motives imputed to the bishop and the 
 defence he is made to give of a self-indulgence 
 which every honorable man would feel to be dis- 
 graceful. None the less was he impressed and 
 even secretly pleased by the triumphant way in 
 which the prelate is made to dispose of his critic. 
 
 '"Letters of Robert Browning," privately printed, London, 
 1895, vol. I, p. 68. 
 
1 78 THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 
 
 The work as a whole led him indeed to take a 
 hopeful view of the poet's spiritual condition. 
 His article concluded with this specially chari- 
 table utterance: "If Mr. Browning," he wrote, 
 "is a man of will and action, and not a mere 
 dreamer and talker, we should never feel sur- 
 prise at his conversion." ^ 
 
 But there is something else essential to the 
 equipment of the poet besides greatness of in- 
 tellect. There is something else essential to 
 poetry besides novelty or profundity of thought. 
 Important as these are, there are other charac- 
 teristics just as important. The poetry created 
 to endure must have felicity and charm of ex- 
 pression, independently of the ideas it seeks to 
 convey. Otherwise it has no superiority to prose. 
 In some of these needed qualities Browning is 
 often lacking to an extent rarely exhibited in the 
 case of any other writer of the first rank. If his 
 virtues are extraordinary, so are his limitations. 
 There is comparatively little in him of that flaw- 
 lessness of form, that propriety of diction, that 
 use of words to clothe the idea not to disguise it, 
 that horizon clear from haze which a modern 
 
 ' The Rambler, a Catholic Journal and Review, new series, vol. 
 V, p. 54, January, 1856. 
 
OF ROBERT BROWNING 179 
 
 poet has designated as the distinctive quaHties 
 which have rendered the Hterature of Athens 
 immortal. With Brow^ning strength was but 
 rarely accompanied with grace. To his failure 
 in these respects was largely due the failure of 
 his general acceptance. As if the variety and 
 profundity of his ideas were not enough to pre- 
 vent the ordinary reader from giving them the 
 painful attention they need for their full compre- 
 hension, he frequently constructed his sentences 
 so as to render difficult, if not to thwart wholly, 
 the efforts of the reader to get any understanding 
 of their purport. The involved constructions, 
 the dislocated sentences, the abrupt transitions, 
 all impose a burden upon him which makes it 
 hard for him to follow easily the train of thought. 
 Furthermore, the mind is apt to be called away 
 from the consideration of the meaning by hav- 
 ing its attention distracted by rugged versifica- 
 tion, by out-of-the-way rymes, by peculiarities 
 of expression that even in the more perfect pieces 
 jar now and then upon the literary sense and de- 
 tract from the exquisiteness of the workmanship 
 displayed. 
 
 This formlessness, this ruggedness, this ob- 
 scurity are faults lying on the surface: They are 
 
i8o THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 
 
 SO obtrusive that no one can miss them, so re- 
 pellent to many that they are deterred from pur- 
 suing farther a quest which opens so unprom- 
 isingly. For years these characteristics of his 
 poetry worked steadily against the recognition 
 of the poet. They cause the same attitude to be 
 taken toward him now save with those who have 
 come to consider and celebrate his uncouthness 
 as art of the highest order; for there is no limit 
 to the intrepidity of a Browning enthusiast. His 
 thought, always worth considering, often pro- 
 found, frequently failed to get itself clothed in 
 adequate expression. This peculiarity is most 
 noticeable in the pieces in which the intellect is 
 acting as the pure intellect and not under the 
 stress of emotion. You are interested in the 
 idea, you are at times lured on by the quaint 
 manner in which the idea is expressed or illus- 
 trated. But this ought not to be the aim of the 
 poet as poet. His business is not to startle and 
 surprise, still less to puzzle and perplex, but to 
 instruct and inspire; and he will never do the 
 last work effectively, he will never be recognized 
 for all time as having done it effectively who fails 
 to appreciate the fact, and to act upon it, that 
 an essential characteristic of the highest poetry is 
 
OF ROBERT BROWNING i8i 
 
 the form which gives it distinction. Gold found 
 in quartz rock may have as much intrinsic value 
 as w^hen it has been smelted and coined; but it 
 can never come into general current use. 
 
 This view of Browning does not represent the 
 attitude of hostile critics, but of personal friends. 
 Take the case of Mrs. Browning herself. In love 
 for the man and in admiration for the poet she 
 could hold her own with the most ardent of the 
 present generation of his female disciples. But 
 neither depth of affection nor loftiness of esti- 
 mate deprived her of her critical faculty. More 
 than once she charged him with perplexing read- 
 ers by presuming their knowledge of what he 
 knew, but which in some cases they could not 
 possibly know, or in other cases could not fairly 
 be assumed to know. She objected also to the 
 frequent roughness of his versification. There 
 was in him a tendency — almost a habit, she ob- 
 served — to make his lines difficult to read. " Not 
 that music is required everywhere," she wrote, 
 "but that the uncertainty of rhythm throws the 
 reader's mind off the rail and interrupts his prog- 
 ress with you and your influence with him." ^ 
 
 ^ "Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett," New 
 York, 1899, ■^°i- I> P- ^34- 
 
THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 
 
 A critical view, essentially of the same sort, was 
 expressed by Landor, one of the warmest of his 
 friends and one of the first to recognize his 
 genius. As early as 1836, in his "Satire upon 
 Satirists," he had hailed Browning as a poet. 
 Yet he found the same difficulty in his writings 
 which has caused perplexity to the rest of man- 
 kind. " I only wish he would atticize a little," he 
 wrote early in the forties. "Few of the Atheni- 
 ans have such a quarry on their property, but 
 they constructed better roads for the convey- 
 ance of the material." 
 
 This tendency to roughness and awkwardness 
 of expression seems to have been inherent in 
 Browning's nature. It would certainly have 
 been lessened and might perhaps have been ex- 
 tirpated by rigid training in his early years. In- 
 stead it was confirmed by the desultory education 
 he received. As a result it became in time prac- 
 tically impossible for him to effect any genuine 
 correction of his own works. What changes he 
 made — and in some pieces they were fairly nu- 
 merous — were of the nature of slight additions or 
 omissions, or of variations, none of which con- 
 tributed anything worth speaking of to clearness 
 of comprehension. For the most part, the ideas 
 
OF ROBERT BROWNING 183 
 
 once put forth, no matter how vaguely or crudely 
 or clumsily expressed, continued to remain in 
 the form in which they originally appeared. 
 Jowett, with whom Browning stayed at the Ox- 
 ford Commemoration in 1887, in commenting 
 upon him to a correspondent, pointed out clearly 
 the nature and origin of the distinguishing 
 peculiarities of his style. "He is a very ex- 
 traordinary man," wrote the Master of Balliol, 
 " very generous and truthful, and quite incapable 
 of correcting his literary faults, which at first 
 sprang from carelessness and an uncritical habit, 
 and now are born and bred in him. He has no 
 form, or has it only by accident when the subject 
 is limited. His thought and feeling and knowl- 
 edge are generally out of all proportion to his 
 powers of expression." ^ 
 
 Along with this carelessness went the most 
 extraordinary self-confidence, and, it is to be 
 added, a self-satisfaction which never hesitated 
 at self-assertion. His sensitiveness to criticism 
 became keener as time went on. It kept pace 
 indeed with the continuing if not growing crab- 
 bedness and roughness of his later verse. It al- 
 
 * Letter to Lady Tennyson in, " Alfred Lord Tennyson, A 
 Memoir by his Son," New York, 1889, vol. II,- p. 344. 
 
1 84 THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 
 
 most seems at times as if this were resorted to as 
 a sort of proclamation of defiance to those who 
 had found fault with him for the manifestation 
 of these qualities. He affected, indeed, to scoff 
 at his censurers. Had he been really indifferent, 
 he would never have gone to the trouble of pa- 
 rading his scorn. The resentment he felt was in- 
 deed distinctly visible and sometimes lamentably 
 displayed. Tennyson, as we all know, was abnor- 
 mally sensitive to criticism; but he never made 
 any such deplorable public exhibition of the feel- 
 ing as did Browning in "Pachiarotto." It must 
 always remain a marvel how any man in full 
 possession of his senses, let alone a man of genius, 
 could have perpetrated the dreadful doggerel of 
 that poem, where the wretchedness of the reason- 
 ing finds its fitting counterpart in the wretched- 
 ness of the expression. Not much better is the 
 shallow defence he made for his method of writ- 
 ing in the epilogue to the volume bearing that 
 title. It is one of the highest of tributes to 
 Browning's essential greatness that his reputa- 
 tion could emerge unscathed from those two dis- 
 tressing struggles to be jocose and satirical. 
 
 Many, perhaps most, of the things which stood 
 in the way of his immediate and general accept- 
 
OF ROBERT BROWNING 185 
 
 ance by his contemporaries were remediable. 
 Yet he was almost disposed to resent the sug- 
 gestion that he should take any steps to remedy 
 them. When Tennyson occasionally rallied 
 him upon the harshness of his rhythm and the 
 length and obscurity of his poems, he had but 
 one answer. " I cannot alter myself," he would 
 say; "the people must take me as they find me." 
 This is a perfectly justifiable attitude for him to 
 assume who is totally indifferent to the opinion 
 of the publit; but he who assumes it has no right 
 to complain if the public chooses not to take him 
 at all. It is assuredly not the attitude of him 
 who fixes his eye on either present or future 
 fame; and Browning was far from being indif- 
 ferent to either. So little indeed was he regard- 
 less of contemporary popularity that he craved 
 it and felt the denial of it to himself as a grievance 
 and an injustice. 
 
 He was fortunate enough, however, to outlive 
 this period of neglect. The reputation of a gen- 
 uinely great poet may be delayed; but it is cer- 
 tain to come at last. Men could not remain for- 
 ever indifferent to the genius displayed in Brown- 
 ing's work, whatever fault they might find with 
 its methods of manifestation. As time went on 
 
1 86 THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 
 
 he steadily made his way into the appreciation of 
 a slowly enlarging circle of admirers; and his 
 greatness was conceded even by those who cen- 
 sured most severely his shortcomings. The 
 welcome which waited upon the publication of 
 ''The Ring and The Book" in 1868-69 proved 
 clearly the increase of the estimation in which he 
 had come to be held. Browning seemed to think 
 that the comparative success of this work, the 
 result of a slowly but steadily rising reputation, 
 was due mainly to its length. He said at the 
 time that he had gained at last the ear of the 
 public, but he had done so by vigorously assault- 
 ing it, and telling his story four times over.^ 
 Knowledge of many abstruse things Browning 
 possessed; but he never discovered that men 
 accepted him in spite of his faults and not be- 
 cause of them. 
 
 It was not remarkable success indeed that he 
 then gained; but as compared with the neglect 
 he had previously endured, it was distinctly 
 noticeable. The acceptance he had at last se- 
 cured would have continued to strengthen and 
 extend itself of its own accord; but owing to ad- 
 
 * "Personal Remembrances of Sir Frederick Pollock," London, 
 1887, vol. II, p. 202. Diary under date of April 3, 1869. 
 
OF ROBERT BROWNING 187 
 
 ventitious circumstances popularity came to him, 
 a little more than half-a-score of years later, with 
 a fulness which he had no reason to expect and 
 which as a matter of fact we know that he did 
 not expect. His last days were cheered by the 
 ample if tardy recognition which was given to his 
 genius. I have said that from the beginning he 
 had been the favorite of a few. He was now to 
 become a favorite of the many. The way had 
 been slowly preparing for him when the one 
 agency came into play that effectually broke up 
 the indifference of the general public. This was 
 the formation of the Browning Society in 1881, 
 established mainly by the efforts of the late Fred- 
 erick James Furnivall. This society with the 
 innumerable branches which sprang from it all 
 over England and America, worked not merely 
 a reform in the poet's favor, but a revolution. 
 It caused his name to be carried far and wide 
 as a household word to every place where litera- 
 ture was known at all, and, it must be added, to 
 no small number of places where it had never 
 been known before, and with the gradual decay 
 of the temporary interest aroused has never 
 been heard of since. 
 
 There are authors to whom it would seem a 
 
THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 
 
 questionable compliment to have societies or- 
 ganized under their name, whose duty it was, 
 among other things, to ascertain the meaning of 
 what they had been saying. Such a society, in 
 the case of a living writer, seems to partake of the 
 nature of an anachronism. Its very existence 
 tends to prove in him who is made the subject 
 of comment and investigation the existence of 
 the very faults from the possession of which he is 
 to be defended. Clearly no thought of this na- 
 ture ever presented itself to Browning's mind. 
 He was delighted with the efforts taken in his be- 
 half as well as astounded by their success. "You 
 very well know," he wrote to Furnivall, in Octo- 
 ber, 1 88 1, "I can say nothing about this extraor- 
 dinary halo of rainbow hues with which your 
 wonder-working hand has suddenly surrounded 
 my dark orb. As with the performances of the 
 mosaicists I see at work here — all sorts of shining 
 stones, greater and smaller, which hardly took 
 the eye by their single selves — suddenly coalesce 
 and make a brilliant show when put ingeniously 
 together — as my dazzled eyes acknowledge, pray 
 believe." * 
 
 ' Letter of Oct. 21, 1881, in "Letters of Robert Browning," pri- 
 vately printed, 1895, vol. I, p. 86. 
 
OF ROBERT BROWNING 
 
 We can all rejoice that this late deferred trib- 
 ute of recognition came to cheer the closing 
 years of the poet. He was no longer obliged to 
 address the English public, as he did near the be- 
 ginning of "The Ring and The Book," with the 
 words "Ye, who like me not." Browning died 
 rejoicing in the fulness of his fame. Gratifying 
 as is the fact, there is hardly any question that 
 much of the sudden and wide-spread popularity 
 secured by the agency just described, was due to 
 something else than appreciation of his genius 
 as a poet. Accordingly, the reputation he thus 
 acquired was largely factitious. As far as it is 
 such, it has no element of permanence. It was 
 not based primarily upon regard for his writings 
 as literature. The rapid growth of the interest 
 taken in them, after once being set in motion, 
 owed its existence and extension to the men 
 who looked upon them as furnishing materials 
 for investigation and decipherment and not as a 
 source of delight and inspiration. 
 
 For Browning is supremely the poet of intel- 
 lectually acute but unpoetical natures. Not but 
 there are men possessed of exquisite literary 
 taste with whom he is not merely a favorite 
 author but the favorite author. What I am try- 
 
igo THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 
 
 ing to bring out is that a very large proportion of 
 the ablest of his thorough-going partisans are 
 much more remarkable for general mental activ- 
 ity than for special literary sensitiveness. The 
 things they admire in him are not those which 
 appeal to the feelings, but those which deal with 
 the reason. No one will deny the value of the 
 poems in which this latter characteristic is pre- 
 dominant — sometimes so predominant in his 
 case as practically to exclude the former. But 
 there are many who will deny their supreme 
 value. Striking thoughts are often in them 
 which impress the mind; fine passages, some- 
 times, which linger in the memory. But too 
 generally lacking in them is that intense fire, 
 that passion which fuses thought and feeling in- 
 to felicity of expression which is the envy and 
 despair of the imitator. The verse which exer- 
 cises and delights the intellect but fails to touch 
 or inspire the heart may in many respects be 
 worthy of the greatest admiration; but it will 
 never take rank as the highest form of poetry. 
 
 It is not to be denied, however, that the hazi- 
 ness which envelops much of Browning's utter- 
 ance piques curiosity in many minds of a high 
 order and imparts to much of his work a peculiar 
 
OF ROBERT BROWNING 
 
 191 
 
 interest of its own. There is, furthermore, a cer- 
 tain class of men who fully believe that obscur- 
 ity is an essential element of profundity. Brown- 
 ing's frequent ambiguity and uncertainty of 
 meaning renders it possible for such persons to 
 find in his words whatever acute intellect or 
 addled brain chooses to look for. They are 
 thereby enabled to read into his work their per- 
 sonal conclusions and beliefs, and make him give 
 his sanction to views of their own which they 
 deem peculiarly profound. The proceedings of 
 the various Browning Societies furnish inter- 
 minable and inconclusive discussions of what he 
 might have meant but did not mean inevitably. 
 One of them, duly recorded, is worth citing as an 
 illustration. A member of the original Browning 
 Society — one conspicuous enough to be chosen 
 to preside at its first meeting — read later a paper 
 before it in which he set forth a certain interpre- 
 tation of the poem entitled "Childe Roland to 
 the Dark Tower Came." This was called in 
 question by the founder of the Society. On this 
 very matter he said that he had consulted the 
 poet himself who had three times uttered an em- 
 phatic "No" to the theory which had just been 
 propounded. Against any such method of as- 
 
192 THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 
 
 certaining the author's sense, the proclaimer of 
 the controverted view protested. If they were to 
 adopt the poHcy of consulting the poet himself 
 as to the meaning he sought to convey, there 
 would be, he insisted, no need of any Browning 
 Society at all/ 
 
 But efforts to give clearness of outline to what 
 is doubtful and perplexing neither implies nor 
 necessitates enjoyment of Browning's poetry as 
 poetry. Still less is such appreciation of it in- 
 volved in the many vague discourses written 
 about it or certain portions of it by men who find 
 a natural outlet for thoughts above the reaches 
 of their souls in language beyond the compre- 
 hension of the ordinary mind. Not even is it 
 necessarily indicated in much of the valuable 
 work which has been given up to the explanation 
 of his words and phrases, to the disclosure of 
 recondite allusion, to the clearing up of difficul- 
 ties of construction. Too much cannot be said 
 in praise of the utility and importance of labor 
 of this nature. But it is in no proper sense the 
 study of literature. It is the same sort of study 
 as that which leads men to the perusal of the 
 
 * Monthly Abstract of Proceedings of the Browning Societ}'. 
 Meeting of May 24, 1882, p. 26. 
 
OF ROBERT BROWNING 193 
 
 works of Homer and Virgil, not for the sake of 
 their poetry but for the hght they throw upon dis- 
 puted points of inflection and syntactical con- 
 struction. A great deal of the interest that has 
 been manifested in Browning investigation is far 
 higher in degree, indeed, but it is not essentially 
 different in kind from that displayed in guessing 
 the answers to riddles or deciphering the enigmat- 
 ical representation of words in the figures found 
 in rebuses; or, if a more dignified comparison 
 be desired, from that employed in the solution 
 of intricate mathematical problems. All this is 
 to say that much of the study given to the poet 
 is not the study of literature. In it exercise of 
 the understanding has been demanded, not gra- 
 tification of the taste nor appreciation of the 
 work of the creative imagination. 
 
 If there be justice in this view it follows that 
 a good deal of the vogue which Browning's 
 poetry suddenly gained was not due to the at- 
 traction which it exercised as literature. That 
 was a subject to which a large proportion of his 
 new admirers were comparatively indifferent. 
 They were not specially susceptible to the charm 
 of poetry as poetry. In the best representatives 
 of this class the intellect had been developed out 
 
194 
 
 THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 
 
 of all proportion to the taste. Such men are not 
 especially drawn to writers in whom loftiness 
 of speculation has found its fitting counterpart 
 in clearness and beauty of expression. To this 
 class belongs the large number of active but un- 
 formed minds. Accordingly, with a body of 
 young and promising students, it would as a 
 general rule be much easier to arouse interest in 
 Browning than in almost any other great author 
 of our speech. The genuine enjoyment of Mil- 
 ton or Wordsworth or Tennyson presupposes, 
 as a fundamental condition, the existence of a 
 certain degree of fondness for literature as litera- 
 ture. But this is ordinarily one of the last results 
 of cultivation. Naturally, for it such persons 
 are in general unprepared. Unquestionably, 
 enjoyment of this precise sort is inspired by 
 Browning's best production. But he presents 
 also a body of poetry of which this cannot be 
 said. The study of it does not demand nor does 
 it develop literary appreciation. But it does re- 
 quire keen intellectual acuteness. The exercise 
 of the latter is the sort of work In which young 
 men of quick minds but undeveloped taste can 
 easily be made to take delight. It is all the more 
 satisfactory to them because while they are do- 
 
OF ROBERT BROWNING 195 
 
 irig little more than unravelling the meaning of 
 linguistic puzzles or dragging an idea to light 
 from its misty hiding-place, they honestly be- 
 lieve that the interest they take in what they are 
 reading is due to their enjoyment of it as poetry 
 pure and simple. 
 
 The formation of the Browning Society there- 
 fore counteracted to some extent the good it did 
 to the extension of his reputation by placing an 
 obstacle in the way of its permanence. As his 
 poorest work was generally his obscurest, to that 
 much of the attention of his professed disciples 
 was devoted. It was largely diverted from that 
 portion of his production which does not need 
 the exploitation of organized bodies to discover 
 and appreciate its beauty and power. Brown- 
 ing's best poems occasionally present puzzles; 
 his poorest frequently present little else; at all 
 events, the most interesting thing about them is 
 the puzzles. Accordingly, these are the pieces 
 which arouse the enthusiasm of certain of his 
 partisans. To them disproportionate importance 
 is attached. To the explanation of the hidden 
 meaning found in them painful research is given 
 up. The disciples celebrate the poet not for 
 what is clearly and vividly expressed but for 
 
196 THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 
 
 what is vague and perplexing. Hence mere 
 Browning societies were found inadequate; so 
 Sordello societies were formed and flourished. 
 Commentaries were produced which, so far as I 
 can judge from my own struggles with some of 
 them, possess a peculiar interest of their own in 
 having achieved the seemingly impossible task 
 of being more difficult to understand than the 
 texts they set out to interpret. In fact, com- 
 mentaries on Browning generally bear a close 
 resemblance to foghorns. They proclaim the 
 existence of fog; but they do not disperse it. 
 
 It need not be denied, however, that obscurity 
 has its advantages for the idolater, if not for the 
 being idolized. It constitutes those who devote 
 themselves to the interpretation and exploitation 
 of the generally unintelligible a class by them- 
 selves. Nothing so conducive to the sense of 
 superiority has ever been devised. The mem- 
 bers of this inner circle of disciples intimate 
 always and sometimes assert that it is only for 
 mental and spiritual athletes like themselves to 
 grapple with the problems of life and conduct 
 which Browning sets before us. Accordingly, 
 they feel justified in assuming an air of compas- 
 sionate condescension to the grosser denizens of 
 
OF ROBERT BROWNING 
 
 197 
 
 the lower literary world, the intellectual outcasts 
 who prize most in the poet what is comparatively 
 easy to read and to understand. They look 
 upon themselves as an elect body. To them be- 
 longs a higher mental development, a clearer 
 spiritual vision. The more puzzling the pro- 
 duction, the keener is their enjoyment of it, the 
 loftier is their estimate of it. It is in works of 
 this character that Browning reserves himself 
 for them. In these he does not lower himself to 
 the mean capacities of the common mind. To 
 the chosen band alone is it given to recognize 
 him there as he is, the seer, the revealer of the 
 mysteries of nature and of life, the bearer of a 
 divine message to his generation. It must 
 always remain a matter of regret, however, that 
 the ability given to these esoteric disciples to 
 penetrate into the mystery of Browning's mean- 
 ing has not been accompanied with a corre- 
 sponding ability to put into intelligible speech 
 what they have brought back from that upper 
 air of speculation to which their strong-winged 
 thought has enabled them to soar. 
 
 If in these lectures I may seem to some to have 
 laid too much stress upon what is imperfect and 
 unsatisfactory in the art and achievement of a 
 
THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 
 
 great poet, it is because I sincerely believe that 
 the exaggerated and unwarranted praise which 
 has been given to a good deal of his work will set 
 in motion a reaction which in turn will have the 
 tendency to bring back the deplorable conditions 
 of indifference to it and consequent neglect of it 
 that waited upon it during a large share of his 
 own life. A great author has a right to demand 
 that he shall be judged by his best. If his poor- 
 est is forced upon us as peculiarly representa- 
 tive by those who set themselves up as his cham- 
 pions, disregard of the former is sure in time to 
 follow. As coming generations recede more and 
 more from Browning's day, they will tend more 
 and more to revolt from the doctrine which des- 
 ignates a portion of his work as supremely in- 
 tellectual and profound, because it is couched in 
 uncouth verse and obscure phraseology. If this 
 be made a point of belief, the circle of his readers 
 will be steadily narrowed. The general acknowl- 
 edgment of the greatness of his genius will never 
 be threatened by the attacks of hostile critics; 
 but it stands in some danger from the constant 
 exaltation of his least satisfactory work by the 
 most vociferous of his extreme partisans. The 
 contemporary indifference manifested toward 
 
OF ROBERT BROWNING 199 
 
 him was largely his own fault; if in time coming 
 there be return of this indifference, for it the un- 
 wisdom of his advocates will be mainly respon- 
 sible. 
 
 For, as I look at it, so all-important in poetry 
 is the expression of the thought, that when the 
 thought is great but the expression unsatisfac- 
 tory, that very fact removes it out of the realm 
 of the highest literary achievement. Accordingly, 
 I venture to take the ground that in the future a 
 great mass of Browning's verse will have but a 
 very limited body of readers and a still more 
 limited body of admirers. It is because I do not 
 believe that there is any lasting pleasure in 
 formlessness, any genuine vitality in inarticulate 
 phraseology, that I express here a view which is 
 opposed to that which has of late had wide ac- 
 ceptance. Poems of his there are which will 
 never cease to be cherished so long as English 
 Hterature endures. Still with his works as with 
 those of ether writers nature in the end will as- 
 sert her rights. The verse of his which will last 
 longest, which will reach the widest circle, which 
 will meet everywhere with the keenest apprecia- 
 tion will be, as it has been, that which offers 
 fewest difficulties either in the way of compre- 
 
ROBERT BROWNING 
 
 hension or of diction. The poems of Browning 
 that will carry his name down to remotest poster- 
 ity will be those that are the least representative 
 of him in the eyes of no small number of his pres- 
 ent admirers. 
 
INDEX 
 
 Adams, Sarah Flower, 8. 
 Argosy, The, 127. 
 Arnould, Je#, 124. J»»efK 
 Athenceum, The, 13, 32, 33, 83, 97, 109. 
 Atlas, The, 12, 13, 32, 33, 82, 93, 109. 
 
 Barrett, Elizabeth Barrett (see Elizabeth Barrett Brown- 
 ing). 
 
 Barrett, Lawrence, 61. 
 
 bombast, 25. 
 
 Bridell-Fox, Mrs., 127. 
 
 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 14, 17, 49, 69, 80, 88, 97, 
 98, 99, 148-152, 157, 160, 161, 164, 167, 168, 181. 
 
 Browning, Robert, birth of, 3; education of, 19; formless- 
 ness and ruggedness of expression of, 178-183; obscur- 
 ity of, 5, 20, 62, 75-84, 168-174; observance of the 
 Unities of, loi, 153-155; popularity of, in America, 93, 
 166, 167; position of, as a dramatist, 24, 60-72, loi; 
 prose of, 105; unpopularity of, in England, 163-167; 
 writings of : 
 Bells and Pomegranates, 96-101, 109, 112, 148, 149, 
 
 /S5> 164. 
 
 Bishop Blougram's Apology, 175-178. 
 
 Bloti' the 'Scutcheon, A, 45, 61, 70, 112, 154; charac- 
 ter of, as a drama, 1 31-146; stage history of, 113- 
 
 131- 
 Camp and Cloister, 157. 
 Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came, 191. 
 Clive, 175. 
 
 20I 
 
202 INDEX 
 
 Colombe's Birthday, 6i, 112, 113, 148, 154. 
 
 Dramatic Lyrics, 155, 156. 
 
 Dramatic Romances and Lyrics, 155, 157, 159-161. 
 
 Flight of the Duchess, The, 158-160. 
 
 Glove, The, 175. 
 
 In a Balcony, 59. 
 
 In a Gondola, 157. 
 
 Incondita, 9. 
 
 King Victor and King Charles, 154, 156. 
 
 Luria, 68-72, 112, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 154. 
 
 Men and Women, 157. 
 
 Pachiarotto, 184. 
 
 Paracelsus, appearance and reception of, 22-44, 47 > 
 
 55> 56, 57> 73. 74, 75, 77, 82, loi, 107, 156. 
 Pauline, appearance and reception of, 7-19, 28, 29. 
 Pied Piper of Hamelin, The, 156. 
 Pippa Passes, appearance and reception of, 59, loi- 
 
 112, 156. 
 Return of the Druses, The, 112, 148, 154. 
 Ring and the Book, The, 186, 189. 
 Sordello, appearance and reception of, 73-93, 95, 106, 
 
 107, 108, 109, 148, 156. 
 Soul's Tragedy, A, 105, 112, 148-153, 154- 
 Strafford, reception of play of, 46-59, 64, 72, 73, 74, 
 
 82, 114, 148, 156; Browning, joint author with 
 
 Forster of biography of, 47-49. 
 Through the Metidja to Abdel Kader, 157. 
 Waring, 124, 157. 
 Browning Society and Societies, the, 16, 48, 128, 160, 
 
 187-192, 195. 
 Byron, Lord, 4. 
 
 Carlyle, Jean Welsh, 76, 86. 
 Carlyle, Thomas, 76. 
 Century Magazine, The, 115. 
 
INDEX 
 
 203 
 
 Chapman, George, 76, 81. 
 Chaucer, Geofifrey, 171. 
 Cobbe, Frances Power, 164. 
 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 38. 
 
 Dante, 74. 
 
 Barley's "Plighted Troth," 118, 119. 
 
 Dickens, Charles, 131. 
 
 Domett, Alfred, 124. 
 
 Donne, John, 21, 
 
 Drury Lane Theater, 117-119, 128. 
 
 Edinburgh Review, The, 57. 
 Eliot, Sir John, 47. 
 
 Examiner, The, 12, 31, 32, 35, 36, 37, 52, 53, 83, 107, 123, 
 130, 155- 
 
 Faucit, Helen (Lady Martin), 51, 52, 58, 113, 122. 
 
 Flower, Eliza, 8, 9. 
 
 Fonblanque, Albany, 12. 
 
 Forster, John, 12, 31, 34, 35, 36-38, 42, 46, 47, 48, 52, 53, 
 
 54, 83, 107, 130, 155, 166. 
 Fox, William Johnson, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 34, 38, 45, 158. 
 Eraser's Magazine, 15, 42. 
 Furnivall, Frederick James, 187, 188, 191. 
 fustian, 25. 
 
 Gosse, Edmund, 35, 115. 
 
 Haymarket Theater, 117. 
 
 Herford, Charles Harold, 124. 
 
 Hood, Thomas, 158. 
 
 Horace, 102. 
 
 Home, Richard Hengist, 42, 43. 
 
 Hunt, John Henry Leigh, 12, 39, 55. 
 
204 INDEX 
 
 Jerrold, Douglas, 76, 78. 
 Jowett, Benjamin, 183. 
 
 Kenyon, John, 97, 98. 
 Kingsley, Charles, 78. 
 Knowles, James Sheridan, 122, 130. 
 
 Landor, Walter Savage, 182. 
 Literary Gazette, The, 12, 14, 34, 83, 109. 
 London Daily News, The 115. 
 London Times, The, 123, 131. 
 Lowell, James Russell, 79. 
 
 Macready, William Charles, 31, 45, 46, 49-54, 57, 58, 70, 
 
 ii3-ii5> 117-125, 127, 156. 
 Marston, Westland, 118, 119, 120, 121. 
 Martineau, Harriet, 73, 77. 
 Metropolitan Magazine, The, 34. 
 Mill, John Stuart, 14. 
 Milton, John, 29, 85, 171, 194. 
 Mitford, Mary Russell, 164. 
 Monthly Repository, The, 8, 11, 35, 38, 158. 
 Moxon, Edward, 23, 96. 
 
 New Monthly Magazine, The, 30, 38, 42. 
 North American Review, The, 79. 
 
 Orr, Mrs. Sutherland, 35, 115. 
 
 Phelps, Samuel, 113, 1 28-130. 
 Phelps, W. May, 129. 
 Poe, Edgar Allan, 161. 
 Pollock, Sir Frederick, 186. 
 
 Rambler, The, 178. 
 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 18. 
 
INDEX 205 
 
 Sadler's Wells Theater, 128-130. 
 
 Scott, William Bell, 55. 
 
 Shakespeare, William, 50, 60, 68-71, 147, 172. 
 
 Sharp, William, 36, 76, 77. 
 
 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 5, 38, 87. 
 
 Smith, William, 122, 130. 
 
 Southey, Robert, 116. 
 
 Spectator, The, 12, 32, 33, 81, 108, in. 
 
 Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 76, 77, 81. 
 
 TaiVs Edinburgh Magazine, 14. 
 Talfourd, Sir Thomas Noon, 31. 
 Taylor, Sir Henry, 29, 36, 42, 44. 
 
 Tennyson, Alfred Lord, 4, 11, 23, 57, 76, 79, 162, 174, 
 184, 185, 194. 
 
 Vandenhoff, John, 53. 
 
 Westminster Review, The, 11. 
 
 Wilson, Effingham, 23. 
 
 Wiseman, Nidiolas Patrick Stephen, 177. 
 
 Wordsworth, William, 38, 79, 168, 171, 194. 
 
iG¥ m-i 
 
One copy del. to Cat. Div. 
 NOV 6 ^5'*