dawn of the modern spirit in the Athens of Socrates and Euripides, revealed the whole temper and tendency of the twilight age between Paganism and Christianity, and recorded the last utterance of the last apostle of the now-conquering creed; he has distilled the very essence of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, the very essence of the modern world. The men and women who live and move in that new world of his creation are as varied as life itself; they are kings and beggars, saints and lovers, great captains, poets, painters, musicians, priests and popes, Jews, gipsies and dervishes, street-girls, princesses, dancers with the wicked witchery of the daughter of Herodias, wives with the devotion of the wife of Brutus, joyous girls and malevolent greybeards, statesmen, cavaliers, soldiers of humanity, tyrants and bigots, ancient sages and modern spiritualists, heretics, scholars, scoundrels, devotees, rabbis, persons of quality and men of low estate, men and women as multiform as nature or society has made them. He has found and studied humanity, not only in English towns and villages, in the glare of gaslight and under the open sky, but on the Roman Campagna, in Venetian gondolas, in Florentine streets, on the Boulevards of Paris and in the Prado of Madrid, in the snow-bound_forests of Russia, beneath the palms of Persia and upon Egyptian sands, on the coasts of Normandy and the salt plains of Brittany, among Druses and Arabs and Syrians, in brand-new Boston and amidst the ruins of Thebes." Walter Pater, commenting on the above criticism by Mr. Symons, remarks: "Imaginatively, indeed, Mr. Browning has been a mulitude of persons; only (as Shakespeare's only untried style was the simple one), almost never simple ones; and certainly he has controlled them all to profoundly interesting artistic ends by his own powerful personality. The world and all its action, as a show of thought, that is the scope of his work. It makes him pre-eminently a modern poet-a poet of the self-pondering, perfectly educated modern world, which, having come to the end of all direct and purely external experiences, must necessarily turn for its entertainment to the world within." The age of Shakespeare, indeed, differed profoundly from the Victorian era. The former was above all an age of action and external interests. The imagination of the Elizabethans stretched out to the New World and the mighty destinies opened up to the nation by the victory over the Spanish Armada. It was an age of confident and victorious enterprise, of single aims, and simple issues. The age of Browning was far more complex; the problems it had to face were not problems of conquest and adventure, but of social organization, of political reform, and of the adjustment of religious beliefs to the changes demanded by philosophy and science. Browning has not Shakespeare's ease and sureness of touch in matters of faith and conscience; the problems of life present themselves to the modern poet in a more complex form, and his characters look at them in a different way. Even Hamlet, with all his tendency to hesitation and meditation, is a man of action, as are all the other Shakespearean heroes and villains; but Browning's people, from Pauline's lover to Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau, are inordinately given to self-analysis. This is indeed what interests Browning-not what his people do, but what they think; and the succession of thought traced in the mind of another man must always be a difficult business for a reader to follow. Men's actions we can see and judge, in some imperfect fashion, but the motives which lie behind these actions are deeply hidden and intermingled. This complex problem interested Browning intensely, and he analyzed it with supreme skill, but such analysis is never likely to hold the attention of the average reader. He might have said of all his poems what he said of one- -"my stress lay on the incidents in the development of a soul: little else is worth study." In this he is the child of his time, which was, like him, analytic rather than constructive; with all the robustness of his religious faith, and the healthy optimism of his outlook on life, he is intellectually an enquirer, a questioner, especially in his last period, even a doubter. But these are high considerations. Browning's philosophy is not for school children; and yet even youthful minds can enjoy readily and easily the story and art of many of his poems, if they are encouraged to undertake the study of them in a simple, natural fashion, and enjoyment should go along with comprehension. As each poem is studied, the questions must at once be asked: What is the situation the poem sets forth? Who is the person speaking? Who is the person spoken to? the person spoken of? All readers will find difficult passages that need explanation, but even young people who give thought to their reading should, under right guidance, get the full meaning out of the simpler ones. The full significance of a particular turn of phrase, interruption, or ejaculation may easily. be missed, and it is an excellent training in accuracy and observation to fulfil the obligation Browning lays upon his readers— that they must read carefully and attentively. While some hints and some help have been given in the notes in this regard, much has been left for the teacher and the student to do as the occasion or their own discretion may suggest. The editor has sought to give only reasonable assistance in a study of Browning which will be found all the more stimulating and delightful, because everything is not cut and dried, but much remains to be discovered, explained, and discussed. III-ORDER OF BROWNING'S COLLECTED POEMS The following table gives the dates at which Browning's collected poems were originally published. Selections included in this volume are given in brackets:— 1841. Bells and Pomegranates, No. 1.-Pippa Passes. [Songs.] 1842. Bells and Pomegranates, No. 2.-King Victor and King Charles. 1842. Bells and Pomegranates, No. 3.-Dramatic Lyrics. [Cavalier Tunes, The Pied Piper of Hamelin, My Last Duchess, Count Gismond, Incident of the French Camp.] 1843. Bells and Pomegranates, No. 4.-The Return of the Druses. 1843. Bells and Pomegranates, No. 5.—A Blot in the 'Scutcheon. 1844. Bells and Pomegranates, No. 6.—Colombe's Birthday. 1845. Bells and Pomegranates, No. 7.-Dramatic Romances and Lyrics. ["How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix," The Italian in England, The Lost Leader, Home Thoughts, from Abroad, Home Thoughts, from the Sea, The Boy and the Angel, The Glove, Saul.] 1846. Bells and Pomegranates, No. 8.—Luria; and A Soul's Tragedy. 1850. Christmas Eve and Easter Day. 1855. Men and Women. [Love among the Ruins, Evelyn 1864. Dramatis Persona. [Rabbi ben Ezra, Prospice, Youth and Art, Apparent Failure.] 1868-9. The Ring and the Book. 1876. Pacchiarotto, with Other Poems. [Hervé Riel.] 1877. The Agamemnon of Eschylus. 1878. La Saisiaz. The Two Poets of Croisic. [Prologue and Epilogue.] 1879. Dramatic Idyls. [Pheidippides.] 1880. Dramatic Idyls. Second Series. [Echetlos.] |