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Life and Letters of Robert Browning-Part45_Mrs.Sutherland Orr(1828-1903)_English Literature(文学名著)-第2页

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Attitude towards his Public -- Attitude towards his Work --



Habits of Work -- His Reading -- Conversational Powers --

Impulsiveness and Reserve -- Nervous Peculiarities -- His Benevolence --



His Attitude towards Women.

When Mr. Browning wrote to Miss Haworth, in the July of 1861, he had said:



`I shall still grow, I hope; but my root is taken, and remains.'

He was then alluding to a special offshoot of feeling and association,



on the permanence of which it is not now necessary to dwell;

but it is certain that he continued growing up to a late age,



and that the development was only limited by those general roots,

those fixed conditions of his being, which had predetermined its form.



This progressiveintellectualvitality is amply represented in his works;

it also reveals itself in his letters in so far as I have been allowed



to publish them. I only refer to it to give emphasis to a contrasted

or correspondingcharacteristic: his aversion to every thought of change.



I have spoken of his constancy to all degrees of friendship and love.

What he loved once he loved always, from the dearest man or woman



to whom his allegiance had been given, to the humblest piece of furniture

which had served him. It was equally true that what he had done once



he was wont, for that very reason, to continue doing.

The devotion to habits of feeling extended to habits of life;



and although the lower constancy generally served the purposes of the higher,

it also sometimes clashed with them. It conspired with



his ready kindness of heart to make him subject to circumstances

which at first appealed to him through that kindness,



but lay really beyond its scope. This statement, it is true,

can only fully apply to the latter part of his life.



His powers of reaction must originally have been stronger,

as well as freer from the paralysis of conflicting motive and interest.



The marked shrinking from effort in any untried direction,

which was often another name for his stability, could scarcely have coexisted



with the fresher and more curious interest in men and things;

we know indeed from recorded facts that it was a feeling of later growth;



and it visibly increased with the periodicalnervous exhaustion

of his advancing years. I am convinced, nevertheless, that,



when the restiveness of boyhood had passed away, Mr. Browning's strength

was always more passive than active; that he habitually



made the best of external conditions rather than tried to change them.

He was a `fighter' only by the brain. And on this point, though on this only,



his work is misleading.

The acquiescent tendency arose in some degree from two equally prominent



characteristics of Mr. Browning's nature: his optimism,

and his belief in direct Providence; and these again represented



a condition of mind which was in certain respects a quality,

but must in others be recognized as a defect. It disposed him too much



to make a virtue of happiness. It tended also to the ignoring or denying of

many incidental possibilities, and many standing problems of human suffering.



The first part of this assertion is illustrated by `The Two Poets of Croisic',

in which Mr. Browning declares that, other conditions being equal,



the greater poet will have been he who led the happier life,

who most completely -- and we must take this in the human



as well as religious sense -- triumphed over suffering.

The second has its proof in the contempt for poetic melancholy



which flashes from the supposedutterance of Shakespeare in `At the Mermaid';

its negativejustification in the whole range of his work.



Such facts may be hard to reconcile with others already known

of Mr. Browning's nature, or already stated concerning it;



but it is in the depths of that nature that the solution of this,

as of more than one other anomaly, must be sought. It is true



that remembered pain dwelt longer with him than remembered pleasure.

It is true that the last great sorrow of his life was long felt






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