poetry from which they are taken.
FOOTNOTES:
Luria, Act iii.
Aurora Leigh, Book Fifth.
Walter Pater, The Renaissance, p, 226.
Aurora Leigh, Book Third.
Preface to Poems, 1853.
George Chapman: A Critical Essay, 1875.
Works, 1847, Preface to Sermons, pp. viii.-ix., where will also be found some exceedingly sensible remarks, which I commend to those whom it concerns, on persons "who take it for granted that they are acquainted with everything; and that no subject, if treated in the manner it should be, can be treated in any manner but what is familiar and easy to them."
"Realism in Dramatic Art," New Quarterly Magazine, Oct., 1879.
Allowing at its highest valuation all that need be allowed on this score, we find only that Mr. Browning has the defects of his qualities; and from these who is exempted? By virtue of this style of his he has succeeded in rendering into words the inmost thoughts and finest shades of feeling of the "men and women fashioned by his fancy," and in such a task we can pardon even a fault, for such a result we can overlook even a blemish; as Lessing, in Laokoon, remarking on an error in Raphael's drapery, finely says, "Who will not rather praise him for having had the wisdom and the courage to commit a slight fault, for the sake of greater fulness of expression?"
George Meredith, Diana of the Crossways.
Italians, it is pleasant to remember, have warmly welcomed the poet who has known and loved Italy best. "Her town and country, her churches and her ruins, her sorrows and her hopes," said Prof. Nencioni, as long ago as 1867, "are constantly sung by him. How he loves the land that inspires him he has shown by his long residence among us, and by the thrilling, almost lover-like tone with which he speaks of our dear country. 'Open my heart and you will see, Graved inside of it Italy,' as he exclaims in De Gustibus."
CHARACTERISTICS OF THE POEMS
(1833–1890)
CHARACTERISTICS OF THE POEMS
(1833–1890.)
1. PAULINE: a Fragment of a Confession.
[Published anonymously in 1833; first reprinted (the text unaltered) in Poetical Works, 6 vols., Smith, Elder and Co., 1868 (Vol. I., pp. 1–41); revised text, Poetical Works, 1889, Vol. I., pp. 1–45.]
PAULINE was written at the age of twenty. Its prefatory motto from Cornelius Agrippa (dated "London, January, 1833. V.A.XX.") serves to convey a hint that the "confession" is dramatic, and at the same time lays claim to the indulgence due to the author's youth. These two points are stated plainly in the "exculpatory word" prefixed to the reprint in 1868. After mentioning the circumstances under which the revival of the poem was forced on him, Browning says:
"The thing was my earliest attempt at 'poetry always dramatic in principle, and so many utterances of so many imaginary persons, not mine,' which I have since written according to a scheme less extravagant and scale less impracticable than were ventured upon in this crude preliminary sketch—a sketch that, on reviewal, appears not altogether wide of some hint of the characteristic features of that particular dramatis persona it would fain have reproduced: good draughtsmanship, however, and right handling were far beyond the artist at that time."
In a note to the collected edition of 1889, Browning adds:
"Twenty years' endurance of an eyesore seems more than sufficient; my faults remain duly recorded against me, and I claim permission to somewhat diminish these, so far as style is concerned, in the present and final edition."
A revised text follows, in which, while many "faults" are indeed "diminished," it is difficult not to feel at times as if the foot-notes had got into the text.
Pauline is the confession of an unnamed poet to the woman whom he loves, and whose name is given in the title. It is a sort of spiritual autobiography; a record of sensations and ideas, rather than of deeds. "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." There is a vagueness of outline about the speaker which is due partly, no doubt, to the immaturity of the writer, partly also to the too exclusive portraiture of inactive mood. The difficulty is acknowledged in a curious "editor's" note, written in French, and signed "Pauline," in which Browning offered a sort of explanatory criticism of his own work. So far as we can grasp his personality, the speaker appears to us a highly-gifted and on the whole right-natured man, but possessed of a morbid self-consciousness and a limitless yet indecisive ambition. Endowed with a highly poetic nature, yet without, as it seems, adequate concentrative power; filled, at times, with a passionate yearning after God and good, yet morally unstable; he has spent much of his strength in ineffectual efforts, and he is conscious of lamentable failure and mistake in the course of his past life. Specially does he recognise and mourn his "self-idolatry," which has isolated him from others, and confined him within the close and vitiated circle of his own selfhood. Led by some better impulse, he now turns to Pauline, and to the memory of a great and dearly-loved poet, spoken of as "Sun-treader," finding in these, the memory and the love, a quietude and a redemption.
The poet of the poem
