Robert Browning | Page 7

the growing fame of Shelley and Keats,
in the atmosphere of literary youth, fierce and beautiful, among new
poets who believed in a new world. It is important to remember this,
because the real Browning was a quite different person from the grim

moralist and metaphysician who is seen through the spectacles of
Browning Societies and University Extension Lecturers. Browning was
first and foremost a poet, a man made to enjoy all things visible and
invisible, a priest of the higher passions. The misunderstanding that has
supposed him to be other than poetical, because his form was often
fanciful and abrupt, is really different from the misunderstanding which
attaches to most other poets. The opponents of Victor Hugo called him
a mere windbag; the opponents of Shakespeare called him a buffoon.
But the admirers of Hugo and Shakespeare at least knew better. Now
the admirers and opponents of Browning alike make him out to be a
pedant rather than a poet. The only difference between the Browningite
and the anti-Browningite, is that the second says he was not a poet but
a mere philosopher, and the first says he was a philosopher and not a
mere poet. The admirer disparages poetry in order to exalt Browning;
the opponent exalts poetry in order to disparage Browning; and all the
time Browning himself exalted poetry above all earthly things, served it
with single-hearted intensity, and stands among the few poets who
hardly wrote a line of anything else.
The whole of the boyhood and youth of Robert Browning has as much
the quality of pure poetry as the boyhood and youth of Shelley. We do
not find in it any trace of the analytical Browning who is believed in by
learned ladies and gentlemen. How indeed would such sympathisers
feel if informed that the first poems that Browning wrote in a volume
called Incondita were noticed to contain the fault of "too much
splendour of language and too little wealth of thought"? They were
indeed Byronic in the extreme, and Browning in his earlier appearances
in society presents himself in quite a romantic manner. Macready, the
actor, wrote of him: "He looks and speaks more like a young poet than
any one I have ever seen." A picturesque tradition remains that Thomas
Carlyle, riding out upon one of his solitary gallops necessitated by his
physical sufferings, was stopped by one whom he described as a
strangely beautiful youth, who poured out to him without preface or
apology his admiration for the great philosopher's works. Browning at
this time seems to have left upon many people this impression of
physical charm. A friend who attended University College with him
says: "He was then a bright handsome youth with long black hair

falling over his shoulders." Every tale that remains of him in
connection with this period asserts and reasserts the completely
romantic spirit by which he was then possessed. He was fond, for
example, of following in the track of gipsy caravans, far across country,
and a song which he heard with the refrain, "Following the Queen of
the Gipsies oh!" rang in his ears long enough to express itself in his
soberer and later days in that splendid poem of the spirit of escape and
Bohemianism, The Flight of the Duchess. Such other of these early
glimpses of him as remain, depict him as striding across Wimbledon
Common with his hair blowing in the wind, reciting aloud passages
from Isaiah, or climbing up into the elms above Norwood to look over
London by night. It was when looking down from that suburban eyrie
over the whole confounding labyrinth of London that he was filled with
that great irresponsible benevolence which is the best of the joys of
youth, and conceived the idea of a perfectly irresponsible benevolence
in the first plan of Pippa Passes. At the end of his father's garden was a
laburnum "heavy with its weight of gold," and in the tree two
nightingales were in the habit of singing against each other, a form of
competition which, I imagine, has since become less common in
Camberwell. When Browning as a boy was intoxicated with the poetry
of Shelley and Keats, he hypnotised himself into something
approaching to a positive conviction that these two birds were the
spirits of the two great poets who had settled in a Camberwell garden,
in order to sing to the only young gentleman who really adored and
understood them. This last story is perhaps the most typical of the tone
common to all the rest; it would be difficult to find a story which across
the gulf of nearly eighty years awakens so vividly a sense of the
sumptuous folly of an intellectual boyhood. With Browning, as with all
true poets, passion came first and made