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Life and Letters of Robert Browning-Part10_Mrs.Sutherland Orr(1828-1903)_English Literature(文学名著)-第2页

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evolution could never mean less or more than a divinecreation

operating on this progressive plan.



The more striking, perhaps, for its personal quality

are the evidences of imaginativesympathy, even direct human insight,



in which the poem abounds. Festus is, indeed, an essentially human creature:

the man -- it might have been the woman -- of unambitious intellect



and large intelligence of the heart, in whom so many among us

have found comfort and help. We often feel, in reading `Pauline',



that the poet in it was older than the man. The impression is

more strongly and more definitely conveyed by this second work,



which has none of the intellectual crudeness of `Pauline',

though it still belongs to an early phase of the author's intellectual life.



Not only its mental, but its moral maturity, seems so much in advance

of his uncompleted twenty-third year.



To the first edition of `Paracelsus' was affixed a preface,

now long discarded, but which acquires fresh interest in a retrospect



of the author's completed work; for it lays down the constant principle

of dramaticcreation by which that work was to be inspired.



It also anticipates probablecriticism of the artistic form which on this,

and so many subsequent occasions, he selected for it.



==

`I am anxious that the reader should not, at the very outset --



mistaking my performance for one of a class with which it has

nothing in common -- judge it by principles on which it was never moulded,



and subject it to a standard to which it was never meant to conform.

I thereforeanticipate his discovery, that it is an attempt,



probably more novel than happy, to reverse the method usually adopted

by writers whose aim it is to set forth any phenomenon



of the mind or the passions, by the operation of persons and events;

and that, instead of having recourse to an external machinery of incidents



to create and evolve the crisis I desire to produce, I have ventured

to display somewhat minutely the mood itself in its rise and progress,



and have suffered the agency by which it is influenced and determined,

to be generally discernible in its effects alone, and subordinate throughout,



if not altogether excluded: and this for a reason. I have endeavoured

to write a poem, not a drama: the canons of the drama are well known,



and I cannot but think that, inasmuch as they have immediate regard

to stage representation, the peculiar advantages they hold out are really such



only so long as the purpose for which they were at first instituted

is kept in view. I do not very well understand what is called



a Dramatic Poem, wherein all those restrictions only submitted to

on account of compensating good in the original scheme



are scrupulously retained, as though for some special fitness in themselves --

and all new facilities placed at an author's disposal



by the vehicle he selects, as pertinaciously rejected. . . .'

==



Mr. Fox reviewed this also in the `Monthly Repository'.

The article might be obtained through the kindness of Mrs. Bridell-Fox;



but it will be sufficient for my purpose to refer to its closing paragraph,

as given by her in the `Argosy' of February 1890. It was a final expression



of what the writer regarded as the fittingintellectual attitude

towards a rising poet, whose aims and methods lay so far beyond



the range of the conventional rules of poetry. The great event

in the history of `Paracelsus' was John Forster's article on it



in the `Examiner'. Mr. Forster had recently come to town.

He could barely have heard Mr. Browning's name, and,



as he afterwards told him, was perplexed in reading the poem by the question

of whether its author was an old or a young man; but he knew that a writer



in the `Athenaeum' had called it rubbish, and he had taken it up

as a probable subject for a piece of slashing criticism.



What he did write can scarcely be defined as praise. It was the simple,




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