Robert Browning | Page 4

which the pedigree of the
Professor is treated in a manner which is an excellent example of the
wild common sense of the book. "His mother was a Dutch woman, and
therefore she was born at Curaçoa (of course, you have read your
geography and therefore know why), and his father was a Pole, and
therefore he was brought up at Petropaulowski (of course, you have
learnt your modern politics, and therefore know why), but for all that
he was as thorough an Englishman as ever coveted his neighbour's
goods."
It may be well therefore to abandon the task of obtaining a clear
account of Brownings family, and endeavour to obtain, what is much
more important, a clear account of his home. For the great central and
solid fact, which these heraldic speculations tend inevitably to veil and
confuse, is that Browning was a thoroughly typical Englishman of the
middle class. He may have had alien blood, and that alien blood, by the
paradox we have observed, may have made him more characteristically
a native. A phase, a fancy, a metaphor may or may not have been born
of eastern or southern elements, but he was, without any question at all,
an Englishman of the middle class. Neither all his liberality nor all his
learning ever made him anything but an Englishman of the middle class.
He expanded his intellectual tolerance until it included the anarchism of
Fifine at the Fair and the blasphemous theology of Caliban; but he
remained himself an Englishman of the middle class. He pictured all
the passions of the earth since the Fall, from the devouring
amorousness of _Time's Revenges_ to the despotic fantasy of _Instans
Tyrannus_; but he remained himself an Englishman of the middle class.
The moment that he came in contact with anything that was slovenly,
anything that was lawless, in actual life, something rose up in him,
older than any opinions, the blood of generations of good men. He met
George Sand and her poetical circle and hated it, with all the hatred of
an old city merchant for the irresponsible life. He met the Spiritualists

and hated them, with all the hatred of the middle class for borderlands
and equivocal positions and playing with fire. His intellect went upon
bewildering voyages, but his soul walked in a straight road. He piled up
the fantastic towers of his imagination until they eclipsed the planets;
but the plan of the foundation on which he built was always the plan of
an honest English house in Camberwell. He abandoned, with a
ceaseless intellectual ambition, every one of the convictions of his class;
but he carried its prejudices into eternity.
It is then of Browning as a member of the middle class, that we can
speak with the greatest historical certainty; and it is his immediate
forebears who present the real interest to us. His father, Robert
Browning, was a man of great delicacy of taste, and to all appearance
of an almost exaggerated delicacy of conscience. Every glimpse we
have of him suggests that earnest and almost worried kindliness which
is the mark of those to whom selfishness, even justifiable selfishness, is
really a thing difficult or impossible. In early life Robert Browning
senior was placed by his father (who was apparently a father of a
somewhat primitive, not to say barbaric, type) in an important
commercial position in the West Indies. He threw up the position
however, because it involved him in some recognition of slavery.
Whereupon his unique parent, in a transport of rage, not only
disinherited him and flung him out of doors, but by a superb stroke of
humour, which stands alone in the records of parental ingenuity, sent
him in a bill for the cost of his education. About the same time that he
was suffering for his moral sensibility he was also disturbed about
religious matters, and he completed his severance from his father by
joining a dissenting sect. He was, in short, a very typical example of the
serious middle-class man of the Wilberforce period, a man to whom
duty was all in all, and who would revolutionise an empire or a
continent for the satisfaction of a single moral scruple. Thus, while he
was Puritan at the core, not the ruthless Puritan of the seventeenth, but
the humanitarian Puritan of the eighteenth century, he had upon the
surface all the tastes and graces of a man of culture. Numerous
accomplishments of the lighter kind, such as drawing and painting in
water colours, he possessed; and his feeling for many kinds of literature
was fastidious and exact. But the whole was absolutely redolent of the

polite severity of the eighteenth century. He lamented his son's early
admiration for Byron, and never ceased adjuring him to model himself
upon