Life of Robert Browning [18]
but never again, perhaps, was he to show so much over-rapturing joy
in the world's loveliness, such Bacchic abandon to the ideal beauty
which the true poet sees glowing upon the forlornest height and brooding
in the shadow-haunted hollows of the hills. The Browning who might have been
is here: henceforth the Browning we know and love stands unique
among all the lords of song. But sometimes do we not turn longingly,
wonderingly at least, to the young Dionysos upon whose forehead
was the light of another destiny than that which descended upon him?
The Icelanders say there is a land where all the rainbows that have ever been,
or are yet to be, forever drift to and fro, evanishing and reappearing,
like immortal flowers of vapour. In that far country, it may be,
are also the unfulfilled dreams, the visions too perfect
to be fashioned into song, of the young poets who have gained the laurel.
We close the little book lovingly:
"And I had dimly shaped my first attempt,
And many a thought did I build up on thought,
As the wild bee hangs cell to cell -- in vain;
For I must still go on: my mind rests not."
Chapter 3.
It has been commonly asserted that "Pauline" was almost wholly disregarded,
and swiftly lapsed into oblivion.
This must be accepted with qualification. It is like
the other general assertion, that Browning had to live fifty years
before he gained recognition -- a statement as ludicrous when examined as
it is unjust to the many discreet judges who awarded, publicly and privately,
that intelligent sympathy which is the best sunshine for the flower
of a poet's genius. If by "before he gained recognition" is meant
a general and indiscriminate acclaim, no doubt Browning had, still has indeed,
longer to wait than many other eminent writers have had to do:
but it is absurd to assert that from the very outset of his poetic career
he was met by nothing but neglect, if not scornful derision.
None who knows the true artistic temperament will fall into any such mistake.
It is quite certain that neither Shakespeare nor Milton
ever met with such enthusiastic praise and welcome as Browning encountered
on the publication of "Pauline" and "Paracelsus". Shelley,
as far above Browning in poetic music as the author of so many
parleyings with other people's souls is the superior in
psychic insight and intellectual strength, had throughout his too brief life
not one such review of praiseful welcome as the Rev. W. J. Fox wrote
on the publication of "Pauline" (or, it may be added, as Allan Cunningham's
equally kindly but less able review in the `Athenaeum'),
or as John Forster wrote in `The Examiner' concerning "Paracelsus",
and later in the `New Monthly Magazine', where he had the courage
to say of the young and quite unknown poet, "without the slightest hesitation
we name Mr. Robert Browning at once with Shelley, Coleridge, Wordsworth."
His plays even (which are commonly said to have "fallen flat")
were certainly not failures. There is something effeminate, undignified,
and certainly uncritical, in this confusion as to what is and what is not
failure in literature. So enthusiastic was the applause he encountered,
indeed, that had his not been too strong a nature to be thwarted by adulation
any more than by contemptuous neglect, he might well have become spoilt --
so enthusiastic, that were it not for the heavy and prolonged
counterbalancing dead weight of public indifference, a huge amorphous mass
only of late years moulded into harmony with the keenest minds of the century,
we might well be suspicious of so much and long-continued eulogium,
and fear the same reversal of judgment towards him on the part of those
who come after us as we ourselves have meted to many an one
among the high gods of our fathers.
Fortunately the deep humanity of his work in the mass conserves it against
the mere veerings of taste. A reaction against it will inevitably come;
but this will pass: what, in the future, when the unborn readers of Browning