BROWNING'S PLACE NOW.

Dominion, Volume 5, Issue 1467, 15 June 1912, Page 9

BROWNING'S PLACE NOW.

Tho centenary of Robert Browning's birth will be commemorated more piously in England than in this country, but there as here his admirers must approach the inevitable testing of his poetical rank with mixed feelings. It is not an unhappy thing for his fame that a good deal that was adventitious in it has fallen away. Browning Societies—so prevalent and in eomo ways so > alarming twenty years ago —exist now as littlo moro than faded survivals. Tho factitious' cult, is largely extinct. Groups of women no longer meet to study "Sordello" in a kind of solemn hush, broken only by somo such exclamation as: "Do you'know, that, line mates mo think that someone has died." Reading Browning as either a task or an achievement lias gone out of fashion. And even those wlio still swear by him are now ready to admit that ho was not always inspired, any more than Wordsworth. lie is read to-day piecemeal, not bolted whole. There is an ominous number of Br.nvpm" "Selections." Th,e process of sifting set in oven before Brownings death in 1889, and has since gone on apace. Now that his hundred years,havo swung lull, there will be many to point out what in him ie enduring, and what of. the earth earthy. Browning's crabbed and fantastic find often obscure style has been made the Bubject both of mirth, and 'indignant praise. It is a nico question whether it has, in the long run, hurt or helped him. Taino describes Carlyles- whimsical and amorphous writing as part of the "humour" of the Teutonic stacks. Among them an author now and then starts up with a definite ' oubh of his public. If they do not understand him, so much tho worso for them. Hβ will, in any case, go his own wilful literary way Browning certainly never cu tivated tho largo public. But it was his themes and habit of thought, even more than his manner of expression, that made him a poet for the few. The story is that Sterling criticised his "Paracelsus as "verboso," end that thereupon Brownin" took to knocking out all connecting words and banishing relative pronouns. But there is good evideiico that us pecu-, liarities dated almost from boyhood, as they certainly persisted in his old ago. They were of a piece with his intellect. His mannerisms were not affectations, and we havo to tako him as he was. Some havo undoubtedly been repelled by Brown-' in»'s style, which Leslie Stephen said was easy to parody but dangerous to imitate; but others have had their curiosity piqued by it, and, after having .been drawn to him first by his stnmjro dress, have kept on "to find tho truo poet within il \s critics are able now to look at tho matter in a largo and. impartial way, they more and moro agree that the. torni of Browning's poetry matters little compared with its substance. It is by tho latter that he will increasingly be judged. If Browning seems somewhat less in vogue to-day than \ ho was in the early eighties, a nntural explanation lies in tho time which ho reflected. It was. on the whole, a period of calm; of settled and hopeful Liberalism. Browning was no poet of revolt, like Shelley. He had no such surging political sentiments «s Byron had to nine in the face of an asitcmished world. Browning did. not enter into the spiritual unrest of his day even to the extent that Tennyson did. I'Jio contests which ho chiefly interpreted tiro those which go on in the soul. Not upon political strivings or democratic aspirations did he wreak himself, but upon the analysis of human beings in stress of, great emotions and inner crises. His poems could thus not often be described—in the legal phriise used of corporations—as "affected with a public inlcri'st." That public interest in them tends to fin?, is not, then, surprising. He furnishes no battlecries for the upheaving movements of the present. _ Browning was a stout optimist, and optimism has gone out of fashion. "All's well with the world" is resented today. .' That real appreciation of the real Browning is as great to-day as it over was, thero is no reason to doubt. At .his best, ho remains unsurpassed. His shorter dramatic poems, his ".\l«n and Women," blend insight with emotion inimitably; while "The King and tho Book" 'must always remain a marvel and a masterpiece , . Even without "the flntiseptic of stylo" it will keep its hold on,

all who hovo eyes for the finest moral and even metaphysical muling of thn suul of iiuui, all done iindct- the guise of :i moving narrative of lmiiiaii wrong and siifi'cri»S and nobility and love, with passages of tho highest poetical achievement. It is for work such as this Unit Di-owning will-long bo prized. His personality, too, is of a sort to perpetuate admiringly; for ho boro himself throughout, his life as one who was a man before ho was a poet. His gentle restraint, his genuine modesty, his persistent avoidance of anything that looked like literary advertising or exploiting or ckp-trap, will gratefully bo remembered. And thn one intense romance of his life—his willingness to -hoed , Emerson's injunction, "Givo all for love, nothing withhold"—his exquisite devotion to his wife; this, too, showed that Robert Drowning could livo poetry as well as write it, and will help to keep his laurel green.—Now York "Nation."