Robert Browning eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 218 pages of information about Robert Browning.
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Robert Browning eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 218 pages of information about Robert Browning.
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.

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Robert Browning from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.