Life of Robert Browning | Page 7

Nature's first law were not a law of excess, the economy of life
would have meagre results. I think it is Turgeniev who speaks
somewhere of her as a gigantic Titan, working in gloomy silence, with
the same savage intentness upon a subtler twist of a flea's joints as upon
the Destinies of Man.
If there be a more foolish cry than that poetry is on the wane, it is that
the great days had passed away even before Robert Browning and
Alfred Tennyson were born. The way was prepared for Browning, as it
was for Shakespeare: as it is, beyond doubt, for the next high peer of
these.
There were `Roberts' among the sons of the Browning family for at
least four generations. It has been affirmed, on disputable authority,
that the surname is the English equivalent for Bruning, and that the
family is of Teutonic origin. Possibly: but this origin is too remote to be
of any practical concern. Browning himself, it may be added, told Mr.
Moncure Conway that the original name was De Bruni. It is not a
matter of much importance: the poet was, personally and to a great
extent in his genius, Anglo-Saxon. Though there are plausible grounds
for the assumption, I can find nothing to substantiate the common
assertion that, immediately, or remotely, his people were Jews.*
-- * Fairly conclusive evidence to the contrary, on the paternal side, is
afforded in the fact that, in 1757, the poet's great-grandfather gave one

of his sons the baptismal name of Christian. Dr. Furnivall's latest
researches prove that there is absolutely "no ground for supposing the
presence of any Jewish blood in the poet's veins." --
As to Browning's physiognomy and personal traits, this much may be
granted: if those who knew him were told he was a Jew they would not
be much surprised. In his exuberant vitality, in his sensuous love of
music and the other arts, in his combined imaginativeness and
shrewdness of common sense, in his superficial expansiveness and
actual reticence, he would have been typical enough of the potent and
artistic race for whom he has so often of late been claimed.
What, however, is most to the point is that neither to curious
acquaintances nor to intimate friends, neither to Jews nor Gentiles, did
he ever admit more than that he was a good Protestant, and sprung of a
Puritan stock. He was tolerant of all religious forms, but with a natural
bias towards Anglican Evangelicalism.
In appearance there was, perhaps, something of the Semite in Robert
Browning: yet this is observable but slightly in the portraits of him
during the last twenty years, and scarcely at all in those which represent
him as a young man. It is most marked in the drawing by Rudolf
Lehmann, representing Browning at the age of forty-seven, where he
looks out upon us with a physiognomy which is, at least, as much
distinctively Jewish as English. Possibly the large dark eyes (so unlike
both in colour and shape what they were in later life) and curved nose
and full lips, with the oval face, may have been, as it were, seen
judaically by the artist. These characteristics, again, are greatly
modified in Mr. Lehmann's subsequent portrait in oils.
The poet's paternal great-grandfather, who was owner of the
Woodyates Inn, in the parish of Pentridge, in Dorsetshire, claimed to
come of good west-country stock. Browning believed, but always
conscientiously maintained there was no proof in support of the
assumption, that he was a descendant of the Captain Micaiah Browning
who, as Macaulay relates in his `History of England', raised the siege of
Derry in 1689 by springing the boom across Lough Foyle, and perished
in the act. The same ancestral line is said to comprise the Captain
Browning who commanded the ship `The Holy Ghost', which conveyed
Henry V. to France before he fought the Battle of Agincourt, and in
recognition of whose services two waves, said to represent waves of the

sea, were added to his coat of arms. It is certainly a point of some
importance in the evidence, as has been indicated, that these arms were
displayed by the gallant Captain Micaiah, and are borne by the present
family. That the poet was a pure-bred Englishman in the strictest sense,
however, as has commonly been asserted, is not the case. His mother
was Scottish, through her mother and by birth, but her father was the
son of a German from Hamburg, named Wiedemann, who, by the way,
in connection with his relationship as maternal grandfather to the poet,
it is interesting to note, was an accomplished draughtsman and
musician.* Browning's paternal grandmother, again, was a Creole. As
Mrs. Orr remarks, this pedigree throws a valuable light on the vigour
and variety of