The Complete Works of Robert Browning: Poems, Plays, Letters & Biographies in One Edition. Robert Browning
I shall no less remain, Dear sir, Your most obedient servant, R. B.
I have forgotten the main thing — which is to beg you not to spoil a loophole I have kept for backing out of the thing if necessary, ‘sympathy of dear friends,’ &c. &c., none of whom know anything about it.
Monday Morning; Rev. — Fox.
The answer was clearly encouraging, and Mr. Browning wrote again:
Dear Sir, — In consequence of your kind permission I send, or will send, a dozen copies of ‘Pauline’ and (to mitigate the infliction) Shelley’s Poem — on account of what you mentioned this morning. It will perhaps be as well that you let me know their safe arrival by a line to R. B. junior, Hanover Cottage, Southampton Street, Camberwell. You must not think me too encroaching, if I make the getting back ‘Rosalind and Helen’ an excuse for calling on you some evening — the said ‘R. and H.’ has, I observe, been well thumbed and sedulously marked by an acquaintance of mine, but I have not time to rub out his labour of love. I am, dear sir, Yours very really, R. Browning. Camberwell: 2 o’clock.
At the left-hand corner of the first page of this note is written: ‘The parcel — a “Pauline” parcel — is come. I send one as a witness.’
On the inner page is written:
‘Impromptu on hearing a sermon by the Rev. T. R. — pronounced “heavy” —
‘A heavy sermon! — sure the error’s great, For not a word Tom uttered had its weight.’
A third letter, also undated, but postmarked March 29, 1833, refers probably to the promise or announcement of a favourable notice. A fourth conveys Mr. Browning’s thanks for the notice itself:
My dear Sir, — I have just received your letter, which I am desirous of acknowledging before any further mark of your kindness reaches me; — I can only offer you my simple thanks — but they are of the sort that one can give only once or twice in a life: all things considered, I think you are almost repaid, if you imagine what I must feel — and it will have been worth while to have made a fool of myself, only to have obtained a ‘case’ which leaves my fine fellow Mandeville at a dead lock.
As for the book — I hope ere long to better it, and to deserve your goodness.
In the meantime I shall not forget the extent to which I am, dear sir, Your most obliged and obedient servant R. B. S. & O.’s, Conduit St., Thursday m-g.
I must intrude on your attention, my dear sir, once more than I had intended — but a notice like the one I have read will have its effect at all hazards.
I can only say that I am very proud to feel as grateful as I do, and not altogether hopeless of justifying, by effort at least, your most generous ‘coming forward’. Hazlitt wrote his essays, as he somewhere tells us, mainly to send them to some one in the country who had ‘always prophesied he would be something’! — I shall never write a line without thinking of the source of my first praise, be assured. I am, dear sir, Yours most truly and obliged, Robert Browning. March 31, 1833.
Mr. Fox was then editor of a periodical called the ‘Monthly Repository’, which, as his daughter, Mrs. Bridell-Fox, writes in her graceful article on Robert Browning, in the ‘Argosy’ for February 1890, he was endeavouring to raise from its original denominational character into a first-class literary and political journal. The articles comprised in the volume for 1833 are certainly full of interest and variety, at once more popular and more solid than those prescribed by the present fashion of monthly magazines. He reviewed ‘Pauline’ favourably in its April number — that is, as soon as it had appeared; and the young poet thus received from him an introduction to what should have been, though it probably was not, a large circle of intelligent readers.
The poem was characterized by its author, five years later, in a fantastic note appended to a copy of it, as ‘the only remaining crab of the shapely Tree of Life in my Fool’s Paradise.’ This name is ill bestowed upon a work which, however wild a fruit of Mr. Browning’s genius, contains, in its many lines of exquisite fancy and deep pathos, so much that is rich and sweet. It had also, to discard metaphor, its faults of exaggeration and confusion; and it is of these that Mr. Browning was probably thinking when he wrote his more serious apologetic preface to its reprint in 1868. But these faults were partly due to his conception of the character which he had tried to depict; and partly to the inherent difficulty of depicting one so complex, in a succession of mental and moral states, irrespectively of the conditions of time, place, and circumstance which were involved in them. Only a very powerful imagination could have inspired such an attempt. A still more conspicuous effort of creative genius reveals itself at its close. The moment chosen for the ‘Confession’ has been that of a supreme moral or physical crisis. The exhaustion attendant on this is directly expressed by the person who makes it, and may also be recognized in the vivid, yet confusing, intensity of the reminiscences of which it consists. But we are left in complete doubt as to whether the crisis is that of approaching death or incipient convalescence, or which character it bears in the sufferer’s mind; and the language used in the closing pages is such as to suggest, without the slightest break in poetic continuity, alternately the one conclusion and the other. This was intended by Browning to assist his anonymity; and when the writer in ‘Tait’s Magazine’ spoke of the poem as a piece of pure bewilderment, he expressed the natural judgment of the Philistine, while proving himself such. If the notice by J. S. Mill, which this criticism excluded, was indeed — as Mr. Browning always believed — much more sympathetic, I can only record my astonishment; for there never was a large and cultivated intelligence one can imagine less in harmony than his with the poetic excesses, or even the poetic qualities, of ‘Pauline’. But this is a digression.
Mr. Fox, though an accomplished critic, made very light of the artistic blemishes of the work. His admiration for it was as generous as it was genuine; and, having recognized in it the hand of a rising poet, it was more congenial to him to hail that poet’s advent than to register his shortcomings.
‘The poem,’ he says, ‘though evidently a hasty and imperfect sketch, has truth and life in it, which gave us the thrill, and laid hold of us with the power, the sensation of which has never yet failed us as a test of genius.’
But it had also, in his mind, a distinguishing characteristic, which raised it above the sphere of merely artistic criticism. The article continues:
‘We have never read anything more purely confessional. The whole composition is of the spirit, spiritual. The scenery is in the chambers of thought; the agencies are powers and passions; the events are transitions from one state of spiritual existence to another.’
And we learn from the context that he accepted this confessional and introspective quality as an expression of the highest emotional life — of the essence, therefore, of religion. On this point the sincerest admirers of the poem may find themselves at issue with Mr. Fox. Its sentiment is warmly religious; it is always, in a certain sense, spiritual; but its intellectual activities are exercised on entirely temporal ground, and this fact would generally be admitted as the negation of spirituality in the religious sense of the word. No difference, however, of opinion as to his judgment of ‘Pauline’ can lessen our appreciation of Mr. Fox’s encouraging kindness to its author. No one who loved Mr. Browning in himself, or in his work, can read the last lines of this review without a throb of affectionate gratitude for the sympathy so ungrudgingly, and — as he wrote during his latest years — so opportunely given:
‘In recognizing a poet we cannot stand upon trifles nor fret ourselves about such matters [as a few blemishes]. Time enough for that afterwards, when larger works come before us. Archimedes in the bath had many particulars to settle about specific gravities and Hiero’s crown, but he first gave a glorious leap and shouted ‘Eureka!’’
Many persons have discovered Mr. Browning since he has been known to fame. One only discovered him in his obscurity.
Next to that of Mr. Fox stands the name of John Forster among the first spontaneous appreciators of Mr. Browning’s genius; and his admiration was, in its own way, the more valuable for the circumstances which precluded in it all possible, even unconscious,