Robert Browning | Page 5

Pope.
He was, in short, one of the old-fashioned humanitarians of the
eighteenth century, a class which we may or may not have conquered in
moral theory, but which we most certainly have not conquered in moral
practice. Robert Browning senior destroyed all his fortunes in order to
protest against black slavery; white slavery may be, as later economists
tell us, a thing infinitely worse, but not many men destroy their fortunes
in order to protest against it. The ideals of the men of that period appear
to us very unattractive; to them duty was a kind of chilly sentiment. But
when we think what they did with those cold ideals, we can scarcely
feel so superior. They uprooted the enormous Upas of slavery, the tree
that was literally as old as the race of man. They altered the whole face
of Europe with their deductive fancies. We have ideals that are really
better, ideals of passion, of mysticism, of a sense of the youth and
adventurousness of the earth; but it will be well for us if we achieve as
much by our frenzy as they did by their delicacies. It scarcely seems as
if we were as robust in our very robustness as they were robust in their
sensibility.
Robert Browning's mother was the daughter of William Wiedermann, a
German merchant settled in Dundee, and married to a Scotch wife. One
of the poet's principal biographers has suggested that from this union of
the German and Scotch, Browning got his metaphysical tendency; it is
possible; but here again we must beware of the great biographical
danger of making mountains out of molehills. What Browning's mother
unquestionably did give to him, was in the way of training--a very
strong religious habit, and a great belief in manners. Thomas Carlyle
called her "the type of a Scottish gentlewoman," and the phrase has a
very real significance to those who realise the peculiar condition of
Scotland, one of the very few European countries where large sections
of the aristocracy are Puritans; thus a Scottish gentlewoman combines
two descriptions of dignity at the same time. Little more is known of
this lady except the fact that after her death Browning could not bear to
look at places where she had walked.

Browning's education in the formal sense reduces itself to a minimum.
In very early boyhood he attended a species of dame-school, which,
according to some of his biographers, he had apparently to leave
because he was too clever to be tolerable. However this may be, he
undoubtedly went afterwards to a school kept by Mr. Ready, at which
again he was marked chiefly by precocity. But the boy's education did
not in truth take place at any systematic seat of education; it took place
in his own home, where one of the quaintest and most learned and most
absurdly indulgent of fathers poured out in an endless stream fantastic
recitals from the Greek epics and mediæval chronicles. If we test the
matter by the test of actual schools and universities, Browning will
appear to be almost the least educated man in English literary history.
But if we test it by the amount actually learned, we shall think that he
was perhaps the most educated man that ever lived; that he was in fact,
if anything, overeducated. In a spirited poem he has himself described
how, when he was a small child, his father used to pile up chairs in the
drawing-room and call them the city of Troy. Browning came out of
the home crammed with all kinds of knowledge--knowledge about the
Greek poets, knowledge about the Provençal Troubadours, knowledge
about the Jewish Rabbis of the Middle Ages. But along with all this
knowledge he carried one definite and important piece of ignorance, an
ignorance of the degree to which such knowledge was exceptional. He
was no spoilt and self-conscious child, taught to regard himself as
clever. In the atmosphere in which he lived learning was a pleasure,
and a natural pleasure, like sport or wine. He had in it the pleasure of
some old scholar of the Renascence, when grammar itself was as fresh
as the flowers of spring. He had no reason to suppose that every one did
not join in so admirable a game. His sagacious destiny, while giving
him knowledge of everything else, left him in ignorance of the
ignorance of the world.
Of his boyish days scarcely any important trace remains, except a kind
of diary which contains under one date the laconic statement, "Married
two wives this morning." The insane ingenuity of the biographer would
be quite capable of seeing in this a most suggestive foreshadowing of
the sexual dualism which is so ably defended in Fifine at the Fair. A
great part of his childhood