7 May: Boreham on Robert Browning

An Impatient Laureate
Robert Browning, whose birthday we observe today, is one of the few men who deliberately set out in life with the intention of becoming a poet. The son of a banker at Camberwell, London, he determined from his very childhood to devote his powers to poesy, and was in a desperate hurry to achieve distinction. At fourteen he was heartbroken because the laurels for which he longed were so slow in coming! We catch a glimpse of him, kneeling before a fire, tearing to tatters a huge pile of manuscripts and committing the fragments to the flames. "I really thought," he says to himself, as he watches the soulful labour of so many lonely hours curl up, crackle, and vanish in the devouring element, "I really thought that I was sent into the world to be a poet, but the publishers will not look at my verses, so here they go!" And, with a heart as heavy as lead, he remains on his knees on the hearthrug until the last sheet has been destroyed!

Whether, by this youthful incendiarism, the boy inflicted on the world an irreparable deprivation, or rendered it a valuable service, nobody will ever know. He rose to his feet vowing never to perpetrate another verse, but ,happily the strength of his resolve was no match for the ardour of his inspiration. Falling once more under the influence of the muse, he found silence impossible. He sang as the birds sing, because it is in their nature so to do. On coming of age, he sent "Pauline" to the publishers, and this time his work found acceptance. Whilst scintillating with rare flashes of beauty, it was, as one might expect, disfigured by obvious betrayals of immaturity, and, as a consequence, it attracted a very limited measure of attention. But its success was sufficient to convince him that there was, as he had hoped, something in him, and he mustered courage to strike his lyre again.

Novels In Poesy Are Still Novels
After an interval of two years, "Paracelsus" appeared. It elicited the admiration of men like Wordsworth and Carlyle; and it unmistakably announced that the impatient young minstrel had at last arrived. If Browning had held to his fireside resolution, and had abstained for the rest of his days from the seductions of poetry, he would have written some of the most powerful novels in the English language. He had a genius for historical romance of the most stately and impressive kind. The bewildering variety of his characters has seldom, if ever, been surpassed. It represents one of the most amazing portrait galleries in our literature; and entitles his crowded canvases to stand side by side with those of Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Sir Walter Scott. Mr. Chesterton used to say that Browning was rather a novelist than a poet. Every phase of human agony, human ecstasy, human villainy, human comedy, and human triumph is vividly portrayed in his throbbing pages.

Mr. A. C. Benson tells us that, of all the celebrities that it was his privilege to meet, he thought Browning the most disappointing. He had expected to see a kind of demigod, a creature who would look like a saint and talk like an archangel. But, to his disgust, there swept into the room a short, sturdy man, with wavy white hair, a short beard and moustache, his cheeks shaven, and presenting a fresh and sanguine complexion. He had no pontifical airs, made no attempt to say witty and startling things, but just chatted away as any well-informed and sensible man might do. This morsel of personal testimony is very valuable. It confirms Macaulay's contention that the average man expects to find the poet a creature of emaciated physique, lantern jaws, stooping shoulders and dreamy eyes that seem perpetually fixed on things remote, and to ordinary men, invisible. It is even possible that the qualities that so startled men like Mr. Benson—the manliness, the robustness and the commonsense of the poet—retarded his popularity and delayed his triumph.

The Poet Becomes The Prophet
It is indisputable, too, that the public likes its poets to flavour their melodious stanzas with a piquant spice of pessimism, a faint suspicion of that lovely melancholy that is calculated to move the susceptible reader to pensive reflections, secret anguish, and delicious tears. There was no such nonsense about Browning. He believed implicitly in the day after tomorrow. A thorough-going optimist, he regarded this as the best of all possible worlds. He treated earth's shadows as the indisputable proof that there is sunshine somewhere, and, turning lustrous and challenging eyes to a rose-tinted future, he greeted the unseen with a cheer, certain that the best was yet to be. "What's life?" he asks,

". . . . . . . . What's life to me?
Where'er I look is fire; where'er I
listen
Music; and where I tend, bliss evermore."

In those words the unconquerable temper of the poet's personality becomes articulate.

Robert Browning was a prophet proclaiming in pages of lyrical magnificence the ultimate victory of love over hate, of good over ill, of truth over error, of life over death. He radiated calm confidence and high hope. His moral passion, like his physical energy, was contagious. The magic by which he transformed the frail invalid whom he bore from her couch to the altar into a vivacious woman, capable of travel, responsibility and motherhood, was characteristic of his entire life and minstrelsy.

Sir Edward Burne-Jones, the eminent painter, attended Browning's funeral at Westminster Abbey. It made him angry, the dirge seemed so incongruous. "I would have given something for a banner or two," he said, "and much would I have given if a chorister had emerged from the triforium and rent the air with a trumpet!" That trumpet-blast, tearing to shreds the depressing atmosphere of that midwinter burial, would have constituted itself an ideal climax and an exquisitely fitting one; for, as Mr. Benson finely said, Browning's supreme achievement lies in his having lifted to his lips a glorious trumpet of noble emotion and blown huge melodious blasts that, gladdening the soul of the generation that he adorned, will echo about the world till earth's last sun shall set.

F W Boreham

Image: Robert Browning