Life of Robert Browning | Page 6

grimily contorting itself because it had its birth out in the great ocean."
On the day of the poet's funeral in Westminster Abbey, one of the most
eminent of his peers remarked to me that Browning came to us as one
coming into his own. This is profoundly true. There was in good sooth
a mansion prepared against his advent. Long ago, we should have
surrendered as to a conqueror: now, however, we know that princes of
the mind, though they must be valorous and potent as of yore, can enter
upon no heritance save that which naturally awaits them, and has been
made theirs by long and intricate processes.
The lustrum which saw the birth of Robert Browning, that is the third
in the nineteenth century, was a remarkable one indeed. Thackeray
came into the world some months earlier than the great poet, Charles
Dickens within the same twelvemonth, and Tennyson three years
sooner, when also Elizabeth Barrett was born, and the foremost
naturalist of modern times first saw the light. It is a matter of
significance that the great wave of scientific thought which ultimately
bore forward on its crest so many famous men, from Brewster and
Faraday to Charles Darwin, had just begun to rise with irresistible
impulsion. Lepsius's birth was in 1813, and that of the great Flemish
novelist, Henri Conscience, in 1812: about the same period were the
births of Freiligrath, Gutzkow, and Auerbach, respectively one of the

most lyrical poets, the most potent dramatist, the most charming
romancer of Germany: and, also, in France, of Theophile Gautier and
Alfred de Musset. Among representatives of the other arts -- with two
of which Browning must ever be closely associated -- Mendelssohn and
Chopin were born in 1809, and Schumann, Liszt, and Wagner within
the four succeeding years: within which space also came Diaz and
Meissonier and the great Millet. Other high names there are upon the
front of the century. Macaulay, Cardinal Newman, John Stuart Mill
(one of the earliest, by the way, to recognise the genius of Browning),
Alexandre Dumas, George Sand, Victor Hugo, Ampere, Quinet,
Prosper Merimee, Sainte-Beuve, Strauss, Montalambert, are among the
laurel-bearers who came into existence betwixt 1800 and 1812.
When Robert Browning was born in London in 1812, Sheridan had still
four years to live; Jeremy Bentham was at the height of his
contemporary reputation, and Godwin was writing glibly of the virtues
of humanity and practising the opposite qualities, while Crabbe was
looked upon as one of the foremost of living poets. Wordsworth was
then forty, Sir Walter Scott forty-one, Coleridge forty-two, Walter
Savage Landor and Charles Lamb each in his forty-fifth year. Byron
was four-and-twenty, Shelley not yet quite of age, two radically
different men, Keats and Carlyle, both youths of seventeen. Abroad,
Laplace was in his maturity, with fifteen years more yet to live; Joubert
with twelve; Goethe, with twenty; Lamarck, the Schlegels, Cuvier,
Chateaubriand, Hegel, Niebuehr (to specify some leading names only),
had many years of work before them. Schopenhauer was only
four-and-twenty, while Beranger was thirty-two. The Polish poet
Mickiewicz was a boy of fourteen, and Poushkin was but a
twelvemonth older; Heine, a lad of twelve, was already enamoured of
the great Napoleonic legend. The foremost literary critic of the century
was running about the sands of Boulogne, or perhaps wandering often
along the ramparts of the old town, introspective even then, with
something of that rare and insatiable curiosity which we all now
recognise as so distinctive of Sainte-Beuve. Again, the greatest creative
literary artist of the century, in prose at any rate, was leading an
apparently somewhat indolent schoolboy life at Tours, undreamful yet
of enormous debts, colossal undertakings, gigantic failures, and the
`Comedie Humaine'. In art, Sir Henry Raeburn, William Blake,

Flaxman, Canova, Thorwaldsen, Crome, Sir Thomas Lawrence,
Constable, Sir David Wilkie, and Turner were in the exercise of their
happiest faculties: as were, in the usage of theirs, Beethoven, Weber,
Schubert, Spohr, Donizetti, and Bellini.
It is not inadvisedly that I make this specification of great names, of
men who were born coincidentally with, or were in the broader sense
contemporaries of Robert Browning. There is no such thing as a
fortuitous birth. Creation does not occur spontaneously, as in that
drawing of David Scott's where from the footprint of the Omnipotent
spring human spirits and fiery stars. Literally indeed, as a great French
writer has indicated, a man is the child of his time. It is a matter often
commented upon by students of literature, that great men do not appear
at the beginning, but rather at the acme of a period. They are not the
flying scud of the coming wave, but the gleaming crown of that wave
itself. The epoch expends itself in preparation for these great ones.
If