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 was a schoolfellow of Browning’s father,
and occupied towards his son something of the position
of an irresponsible uncle. He was a rotund, rosy
old gentleman, fond of comfort and the courtesies
of life, but fond of them more for others, though much
for himself. Elizabeth Barrett in after years
wrote of “the brightness of his carved speech,”
which would appear to suggest that he practised that
urbane and precise order of wit which was even then
old-fashioned. Yet, notwithstanding many talents
of this kind, he was not so much an able man as the
natural friend and equal of able men.