Robert Browning | Page 3

all the three races above named could be
connected with Browning's personality. If we believed, for instance,
that he really came of a race of mediæval barons, we should say at once
that from them he got his pre-eminent spirit of battle: we should be
right, for every line in his stubborn soul and his erect body did really
express the fighter; he was always contending, whether it was with a
German theory about the Gnostics, or with a stranger who elbowed his
wife in a crowd. Again, if we had decided that he was a Jew, we should
point out how absorbed he was in the terrible simplicity of monotheism:
we should be right, for he was so absorbed. Or again, in the case even
of the negro fancy; it would not be difficult for us to suggest a love of
colour, a certain mental gaudiness, a pleasure
"When reds and blues were indeed red and blue,"
as he says in The Ring and the Book. We should be right; for there
really was in Browning a tropical violence of taste, an artistic scheme
compounded as it were, of orchids and cockatoos, which, amid our cold
English poets, seems scarcely European. All this is extremely
fascinating; and it may be true. But, as has above been suggested, here
comes in the great temptation of this kind of work, the noble temptation
to see too much in everything. The biographer can easily see a personal
significance in these three hypothetical nationalities. But is there in the
world a biographer who could lay his hand upon his heart and say that
he would not have seen as much significance in any three other
nationalities? If Browning's ancestors had been Frenchmen, should we
not have said that it was from them doubtless that he inherited that

logical agility which marks him among English poets? If his
grandfather had been a Swede, should we not have said that the old
sea-roving blood broke out in bold speculation and insatiable travel? If
his great-aunt had been a Red Indian, should we not have said that only
in the Ojibways and the Blackfeet do we find the Browning
fantasticality combined with the Browning stoicism? This
over-readiness to seize hints is an inevitable part of that secret
hero-worship which is the heart of biography. The lover of great men
sees signs of them long before they begin to appear on the earth, and,
like some old mythological chronicler, claims as their heralds the
storms and the falling stars.
A certain indulgence must therefore be extended to the present writer if
he declines to follow that admirable veteran of Browning study, Dr.
Furnivall, into the prodigious investigations which he has been
conducting into the condition of the Browning family since the
beginning of the world. For his last discovery, the descent of Browning
from a footman in the service of a country magnate, there seems to be
suggestive, though not decisive evidence. But Browning's descent from
barons, or Jews, or lackeys, or black men, is not the main point
touching his family. If the Brownings were of mixed origin, they were
so much the more like the great majority of English middle-class
people. It is curious that the romance of race should be spoken of as if
it were a thing peculiarly aristocratic; that admiration for rank, or
interest in family, should mean only interest in one not very interesting
type of rank and family. The truth is that aristocrats exhibit less of the
romance of pedigree than any other people in the world. For since it is
their principle to marry only within their own class and mode of life,
there is no opportunity in their case for any of the more interesting
studies in heredity; they exhibit almost the unbroken uniformity of the
lower animals. It is in the middle classes that we find the poetry of
genealogy; it is the suburban grocer standing at his shop door whom
some wild dash of Eastern or Celtic blood may drive suddenly to a
whole holiday or a crime. Let us admit then, that it is true that these
legends of the Browning family have every abstract possibility. But it is
a far more cogent and apposite truth that if a man had knocked at the
door of every house in the street where Browning was born, he would

have found similar legends in all of them. There is hardly a family in
Camberwell that has not a story or two about foreign marriages a few
generations back; and in all this the Brownings are simply a typical
Camberwell family. The real truth about Browning and men like him
can scarcely be better expressed than in the words of that very wise and
witty story, Kingsley's Water Babies, in