Robert Browning | Page 6

was passed in the society of his only sister

Sariana; and it is a curious and touching fact that with her also he
passed his last days. From his earliest babyhood he seems to have lived
in a more or less stimulating mental atmosphere; but as he emerged into
youth he came under great poetic influences, which made his father's
classical poetic tradition look for the time insipid. Browning began to
live in the life of his own age.
As a young man he attended classes at University College; beyond this
there is little evidence that he was much in touch with intellectual
circles outside that of his own family. But the forces that were moving
the literary world had long passed beyond the merely literary area.
About the time of Browning's boyhood a very subtle and profound
change was beginning in the intellectual atmosphere of such homes as
that of the Brownings. In studying the careers of great men we tend
constantly to forget that their youth was generally passed and their
characters practically formed in a period long previous to their
appearance in history. We think of Milton, the Restoration Puritan, and
forget that he grew up in the living shadow of Shakespeare and the full
summer of the Elizabethan drama. We realise Garibaldi as a sudden
and almost miraculous figure rising about fifty years ago to create the
new Kingdom of Italy, and we forget that he must have formed his first
ideas of liberty while hearing at his father's dinner-table that Napoleon
was the master of Europe. Similarly, we think of Browning as the great
Victorian poet, who lived long enough to have opinions on Mr.
Gladstone's Home Rule Bill, and forget that as a young man he passed
a bookstall and saw a volume ticketed "Mr. Shelley's Atheistic Poem,"
and had to search even in his own really cultivated circle for some one
who could tell him who Mr. Shelley was. Browning was, in short, born
in the afterglow of the great Revolution.
The French Revolution was at root a thoroughly optimistic thing. It
may seem strange to attribute optimism to anything so destructive; but,
in truth, this particular kind of optimism is inevitably, and by its nature,
destructive. The great dominant idea of the whole of that period, the
period before, during, and long after the Revolution, is the idea that
man would by his nature live in an Eden of dignity, liberty and love,
and that artificial and decrepit systems are keeping him out of that Eden.

No one can do the least justice to the great Jacobins who does not
realise that to them breaking the civilisation of ages was like breaking
the cords of a treasure-chest. And just as for more than a century great
men had dreamed of this beautiful emancipation, so the dream began in
the time of Keats and Shelley to creep down among the dullest
professions and the most prosaic classes of society. A spirit of revolt
was growing among the young of the middle classes, which had
nothing at all in common with the complete and pessimistic revolt
against all things in heaven or earth, which has been fashionable among
the young in more recent times. The Shelleyan enthusiast was
altogether on the side of existence; he thought that every cloud and
clump of grass shared his strict republican orthodoxy. He represented,
in short, a revolt of the normal against the abnormal; he found himself,
so to speak, in the heart of a wholly topsy-turvy and blasphemous state
of things, in which God was rebelling against Satan. There began to
arise about this time a race of young men like Keats, members of a not
highly cultivated middle class, and even of classes lower, who felt in a
hundred ways this obscure alliance with eternal things against temporal
and practical ones, and who lived on its imaginative delight. They were
a kind of furtive universalist; they had discovered the whole cosmos,
and they kept the whole cosmos a secret. They climbed up dark stairs to
meagre garrets, and shut themselves in with the gods. Numbers of the
great men, who afterwards illuminated the Victorian era, were at this
time living in mean streets in magnificent daydreams. Ruskin was
solemnly visiting his solemn suburban aunts; Dickens was going to and
fro in a blacking factory; Carlyle, slightly older, was still lingering on a
poor farm in Dumfriesshire; Keats had not long become the assistant of
the country surgeon when Browning was a boy in Camberwell. On all
sides there was the first beginning of the æsthetic stir in the middle
classes which expressed itself in the combination of so many poetic
lives with so many prosaic livelihoods. It was the age of inspired
office-boys.
Browning grew up, then, with