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ROBERT BROWNING

The Browning Centenary

By Hamilton W. Mabie

HE one hundredth anniversary of the birth of Robert Browning, which falls on May 7, finds him securely established among the English poets. Browning has entered into the thought of serious men and women in an unusual degree; this has been at once his good and his evil fortune. He has spoken in ringing tones of courage and hope to a great throng of people to whom the music of Tennyson, freighted as it is with beautiful thought, has not made the same appeal. On the other hand, the weight and complexity of Browning's thought have diverted attention from his art, and the philosopher has commanded from not a few students more attention than the poet.

No body of thought, however lofty, becomes poetry unless it allies itself with music; and wise lovers of Browning are perfectly aware that a very considerable body of his verse is interesting from the standpoint of psychology rather than of literature.

The problems presented by Browning are deeply interesting, and have drawn to him many people who have cared chiefly for intellectual and moral problems and for the involution and convolutions of character rather than for the poetry for its own sake.

Passing along a street in London-so the story runs Browning saw a card announcing the meeting of a Browning Society. He entered, and sat in obscurity by the door. The club was discussing a passage in one

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of the longer poems. Many ingenious interpretations were advanced which were of a surprising nature to the author of the poem. At last he modestly rose and suggested a quite obvious meaning. He was not recognized, and his suggestion was disregarded as altogether too simple and plain, for the subtle men and women who were present were there not so much to enjoy the poet as to guess at his meaning.

But, in spite of the long public indifference which Browning provoked by the publication of "Paracelsus" and confirmed by the publication of "Sordello," and despite the great mass of glossaries, interpretations, and papers of the Browning societies which have come into existence since, Robert Browning stands in the front rank of modern English poets; and, after all deductions are made from his work, his position remains as secure as that of Tennyson. For Browning at his best was a great and moving artist. His feeling for the beauty of the world and the variety and significance of human life had immense youthfulness, and his verse has the freshness of the spring vigor in it. He saw the world as if he were the first man; and all the writers who had turned the pages of the Book of Life did not stand for a moment between him and its original and primitive meaning. His insight into character was backed by a great and unfailing interest in human nature in all its phases; and nothing called out his utmost power more certainly than the opportunity of tracing an obscure motive back to its source, and then following it through all its modifications by other motives to its final issue in action.

His vitality was shown not only in freshness of feeling and phrase, but in the power of intense concentration. In his conception of life and in his diction Browning was at the farthest possible remove from Dante; but in his power of focusing his whole nature at a single point, and keeping that point steadily in view, Browning was the peer of the author of "The Divine Comedy." He can pack a tragedy in four or five lines, sometimes in a phrase. He can tell a story in a sentence. Does any reader of imagination need any elaboration of these lines?

"Dear dead women, with such hair, too-what has become of all the gold Used to hang and brush their bosoms? I feel chilly and grown old."

Browning wrote a few notable dramas of

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