Robert Browning | Page 8

intellectual expression, the
hunger for beauty making literature as the hunger for bread made a
plough. The life he lived in those early days was no life of dull
application; there was no poet whose youth was so young. When he
was full of years and fame, and delineating in great epics the beauty
and horror of the romance of southern Europe, a young man, thinking
to please him, said, "There is no romance now except in Italy." "Well,"
said Browning, "I should make an exception of Camberwell."

Such glimpses will serve to indicate the kind of essential issue that
there was in the nature of things between the generation of Browning
and the generation of his father. Browning was bound in the nature of
things to become at the outset Byronic, and Byronism was not, of
course, in reality so much a pessimism about civilised things as an
optimism about savage things. This great revolt on behalf of the
elemental which Keats and Shelley represented was bound first of all to
occur. Robert Browning junior had to be a part of it, and Robert
Browning senior had to go back to his water colours and the faultless
couplets of Pope with the full sense of the greatest pathos that the
world contains, the pathos of the man who has produced something that
he cannot understand.
The earliest works of Browning bear witness, without exception, to this
ardent and somewhat sentimental evolution. Pauline appeared
anonymously in 1833. It exhibits the characteristic mark of a juvenile
poem, the general suggestion that the author is a thousand years old.
Browning calls it a fragment of a confession; and Mr. Johnson Fox, an
old friend of Browning's father, who reviewed it for _Tait's Magazine_,
said, with truth, that it would be difficult to find anything more purely
confessional. It is the typical confession of a boy laying bare all the
spiritual crimes of infidelity and moral waste, in a state of genuine
ignorance of the fact that every one else has committed them. It is
wholesome and natural for youth to go about confessing that the grass
is green, and whispering to a priest hoarsely that it has found a sun in
heaven. But the records of that particular period of development, even
when they are as ornate and beautiful as Pauline, are not necessarily or
invariably wholesome reading. The chief interest of Pauline, with all its
beauties, lies in a certain almost humorous singularity, the fact that
Browning, of all people, should have signalised his entrance into the
world of letters with a poem which may fairly be called morbid. But
this is a morbidity so general and recurrent that it may be called in a
contradictory phrase a healthy morbidity; it is a kind of intellectual
measles. No one of any degree of maturity in reading Pauline will be
quite so horrified at the sins of the young gentleman who tells the story
as he seems to be himself. It is the utterance of that bitter and
heartrending period of youth which comes before we realise the one

grand and logical basis of all optimism--the doctrine of original sin.
The boy at this stage being an ignorant and inhuman idealist, regards
all his faults as frightful secret malformations, and it is only later that
he becomes conscious of that large and beautiful and benignant
explanation that the heart of man is deceitful above all things and
desperately wicked. That Browning, whose judgment on his own work
was one of the best in the world, took this view of Pauline in after
years is quite obvious. He displayed a very manly and unique capacity
of really laughing at his own work without being in the least ashamed
of it. "This," he said of Pauline, "is the only crab apple that remains of
the shapely tree of life in my fool's paradise." It would be difficult to
express the matter more perfectly. Although Pauline was published
anonymously, its authorship was known to a certain circle, and
Browning began to form friendships in the literary world. He had
already become acquainted with two of the best friends he was ever
destined to have, Alfred Domett, celebrated in "The Guardian Angel"
and "Waring," and his cousin Silverthorne, whose death is spoken of in
one of the most perfect lyrics in the English language, Browning's
"May and Death." These were men of his own age, and his manner of
speaking of them gives us many glimpses into that splendid world of
comradeship which. Plato and Walt Whitman knew, with its endless
days and its immortal nights. Browning had a third friend destined to
play an even greater part in his life, but who belonged to an older
generation and a statelier school of manners and scholarship. Mr.
Kenyon