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Mrs. Browning was passionately interested in the Italian struggle for
independence against Austrian tyranny, and her sudden death in 1861 seems
to have been hastened by that of the Italian statesman Cavour. Browning, at
first inconsolable, soon returned with his son to London, where he again
made his home, for the rest of his life. Henceforth he published much
poetry, for the most part long pieces of subtile psychological and
spiritual analysis. In 1868-9 he brought out his characteristic
masterpiece, 'The Ring and the Book,' a huge psychological epic, which
proved the tardy turning point in his reputation. People might not
understand the poem, but they could not disregard it, the author became
famous, almost popular, and a Browning cult arose, marked by the spread of
Browning societies in both England and America. Browning enjoyed his
success for twenty years and died quietly in 1889 at the home of his son in
Venice.

Browning earnestly reciprocated his wife's loyal devotion and seemed really
to believe, as he often insisted, that her poetry was of a higher order
than his own. Her achievement, indeed, was generally overestimated, in her
own day and later, but it is now recognized that she is scarcely a really
great artist. Her intense emotion, her fine Christian idealism, and her
very wide reading give her real power; her womanly tenderness is admirable;
and the breadth of her interests and sometimes the clearness of her
judgment are notable; but her secluded life of ill-health rendered her
often sentimental, high-strung, and even hysterical. She has in her the
impulses and material of great poetry, but circumstances and her
temperament combined to deny her the patient self-discipline necessary for
the best results. She writes vehemently to assert the often-neglected
rights of women and children or to denounce negro slavery and all
oppression; and sometimes, as when in 'The Cry of the Children' she
revealed the hideousness of child-labor in the factories, she is genuine
and irresistible; but more frequently she produces highly romantic or
mystical imaginary narrations (often in medieval settings). She not seldom
mistakes enthusiasm or indignation for artistic inspiration, and she is
repeatedly and inexcusably careless in meter and rime. Perhaps her most
satisfactory poems, aside from those above mentioned, are 'The Vision of
Poets' and 'The Rime of the Duchess May.'

In considering the poetry of Robert Browning the inevitable first general
point is the nearly complete contrast with Tennyson. For the melody and
exquisite beauty of phrase and description which make so large a part of
Tennyson's charm, Browning cares very little; his chief merits as an artist
lie mostly where Tennyson is least strong; and he is a much more
independent and original thinker than Tennyson. This will become more
evident in a survey of his main characteristics.

1. Browning is the most thoroughly vigorous and dramatic of all great poets
who employ other forms than the actual drama. Of his hundreds of poems the
great majority set before the reader a glimpse of actual life and human
personalities--an action, a situation, characters, or a character--in the
clearest and most vivid possible way. Sometimes the poem is a ringing
narration of a fine exploit, like 'How They Brought the Good News';
sometimes it is quieter and more reflective. Whatever the style, however,
in the great majority of cases Browning employs the form which without
having actually invented it he developed into an instrument of thitherto
unsuspected power, namely the dramatic monolog in which a character
discusses his situation or life or some central part or incident, of it,
under circumstances which reveal with wonderful completeness its
significance and his own essential character. To portray and interpret life
in this way, to give his readers a sudden vivid understanding of its main
forces and conditions in representative moments, may be called the first
obvious purpose, or perhaps rather instinct, of Browning and his poetry.
The dramatic economy of space which he generally attains in his monologs is
marvelous. In 'My Last Duchess' sixty lines suffice to etch into our
memories with incredible completeness and clearness two striking
characters, an interesting situation, and the whole of a life's tragedy.

2. Despite his power over external details it is in the human characters,
as the really significant and permanent elements of life, that Browning is
chiefly interested; indeed he once declared directly that the only thing
that seemed to him worth while was the study of souls. The number and range
of characters that he has portrayed are unprecedented, and so are the
keenness, intenseness, and subtilety of the analysis. Andrea del Sarto, Fra
Lippo Lippi, Cleon, Karshish, Balaustion, and many scores of others, make
of his poems a great gallery of portraits unsurpassed in interest by those
of any author whatever except Shakspere. It is little qualification of his
achievement to add that all his persons are somewhat colored by his own
personality and point of view, or that in his later poetry he often splits
hairs very ingeniously in his effort to understand and present
sympathetically the motives of all characters, even the worst. These are
merely some of the secondary aspects of his peculiar genius. Browning's
favorite heroes and heroines, it should be added, are men and women much
like himself, of strong will and decisive power of action, able to take the
lead vigorously and unconventionally and to play controlling parts in the
drama of life.

3. The frequent comparative difficulty of Browning's poetry arises in large
part first from the subtilety of his thought and second from the obscurity
of his subject-matter and his fondness for out-of-the-way characters. It is
increased by his disregard of the difference between his own extraordinary
mental power and agility on the one hand and on the other the capacity of
the average person, a disregard which leads him to take much for granted
that most readers are obliged to study out with no small amount of labor.
Moreover Browning was hasty in composition, corrected his work little, if
at all, and was downright careless in such details as sentence structure.
But the difficulty arising from these various eccentricities occurs chiefly
in his longer poems, and often serves mainly as a mental stimulus. Equally
striking, perhaps, is his frequent grotesqueness in choice of subject and
in treatment, which seems to result chiefly from his wish to portray the
world as it actually is, keeping in close touch with genuine everyday
reality; partly also from his instinct to break away from placid and
fiberless conventionality.

4. Browning is decidedly one of those who hold the poet to be a teacher,
and much, indeed most, of his poetry is occupied rather directly with the
questions of religion and the deeper meanings of life. Taken all together,
that is, his poetry constitutes a very extended statement of his philosophy
of life. The foundation of his whole theory is a confident and aggressive
optimism. He believes, partly on the basis of intellectual reasoning, but
mainly on what seems to him the convincing testimony of instinct, that the
universe is controlled by a loving God, who has made life primarily a thing
of happiness for man. Man should accept life with gratitude and enjoy to
the full all its possibilities. Evil exists only to demonstrate the value
of Good and to develop character, which can be produced only by hard and
sincere struggle. Unlike Tennyson, therefore, Browning has full confidence
in present reality--he believes that life on earth is predominantly good.
Nevertheless earthly life is evidently incomplete in itself, and the
central law of existence is Progress, which gives assurance of a future
life where man may develop the spiritual nature which on earth seems to
have its beginning and distinguishes man from the brutes. This future life,
however, is probably not one but many, a long succession of lives, the
earlier ones not so very different, perhaps, from the present one on earth;
and even the worst souls, commencing the next life, perhaps, as a result of
their failure here, at a spiritual stage lower than the present one, must
ultimately pass through all stages of the spiritual process, and come to
stand with all the others near the perfection of God himself. This whole
theory, which, because later thought has largely adopted it from Browning,
seems much less original to-day than when he first propounded it, is stated
and reiterated in his poems with a dynamic idealizing power which, whether
or not one assents to it in details, renders it magnificently stimulating.
It is rather fully expressed as a whole, in two of Browning's best known
and finest poems, 'Rabbi ben Ezra,' and 'Abt Vogler.' Some critics, it
should be added, however, feel that Browning is too often and too
insistently a teacher in his poetry and that his art would have gained if
he had introduced his philosophy much more incidentally.

5. In his social theory Browning differs not only from Tennyson but from
the prevailing thought of his age, differs in that his emphasis is
individualistic. Like all the other Victorians he dwells on the importance
of individual devotion to the service of others, but he believes that the
chief results of such effort must be in the development of the individual's
character, not greatly in the actual betterment of the world. The world,
indeed, as it appears to him, is a place of probation and we cannot expect
ever to make it over very radically; the important thing is that the
individual soul shall use it to help him on his 'lone way' to heaven.
Browning, accordingly, takes almost no interest in the specific social and
political questions of his day, a fact which certainly will not operate
against the permanence of his fame. More detrimental, no doubt, aside from
the actual faults which we have mentioned, will be his rather extravagant
Romanticism--the vehemence of his passion and his insistence on the supreme
value of emotion. With these characteristics classically minded critics
have always been highly impatient, and they will no doubt prevent him from
ultimately taking a place beside Shakspere and the serene Milton; but they
will not seriously interfere, we may be certain, with his recognition as
one of the very great English poets.

ROSSETTI AND THE PRE-RAPHAELITE MOVEMENT. Many of the secondary Victorian
poets must here be passed by, but several of them are too important to be
dismissed without at least brief notice. The middle of the century is
marked by a new Romantic impulse, the Pre-Raphaelite Movement, which begins
with Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Rossetti was born in London in 1828. His father
was an Italian, a liberal refugee from the outrageous government of Naples,
and his mother was also half Italian. The household, though poor, was a
center for other Italian exiles, but this early and tempestuous political
atmosphere created in the poet, by reaction, a lifelong aversion for
politics. His desultory education was mostly in the lines of painting and
the Italian and English poets. His own practice in poetry began as early as
is usual with poets, and before he was nineteen, by a special inspiration,
he wrote his best and most famous poem, 'The Blessed Damosel.' In the
school of the Royal Academy of Painting, in 1848, he met William Holman
Hunt and John E. Millais, and the three formed the Pre-Raphaelite
Brotherhood, in which Rossetti, whose disposition throughout his life was
extremely self-assertive, or even domineering, took the lead. The purpose
of the Brotherhood was to restore to painting and literature the qualities
which the three enthusiasts found in the fifteenth century Italian
painters, those who just preceded Raphael. Rossetti and his friends did not
decry the noble idealism of Raphael himself, but they felt that in trying
to follow his grand style the art of their own time had become too abstract
and conventional. They wished to renew emphasis on serious emotion,
imagination, individuality, and fidelity to truth; and in doing so they
gave special attention to elaboration of details in a fashion distinctly
reminiscent of medievalism. Their work had much, also, of medieval
mysticism and symbolism. Besides painting pictures they published a very
short-lived periodical, 'The Germ,' containing both literary material and
drawings. Ruskin, now arriving at fame and influence, wrote vigorously in
their favor, and though the Brotherhood did not last long as an
organization, it has exerted a great influence on subsequent painting.

Rossetti's impulses were generous, but his habits were eccentric and
selfish, and his life unfortunate. His engagement with Miss Eleanor Siddal,
a milliner's apprentice (whose face appears in many of his pictures), was
prolonged by his lack of means for nine years; further, he was an agnostic,
while she held a simple religious faith, and she was carrying on a losing
struggle with tuberculosis. Sixteen months after their marriage she died,
and on a morbid impulse of remorse for inconsiderateness in his treatment
of her Rossetti buried his poems, still unpublished, in her coffin. After
some years, however, he was persuaded to disinter and publish them.
Meanwhile he had formed friendships with the slightly younger artists
William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones, and they established a company for
the manufacture of furniture and other articles, to be made beautiful as
well as useful, and thus to aid in spreading the esthetic sense among the
English people. After some years Rossetti and Burne-Jones withdrew from the
enterprise, leaving it to Morris. Rossetti continued all his life to
produce both poetry and paintings. His pictures are among the best and most
gorgeous products of recent romantic art--'Dante's Dream,' 'Beata Beatrix,'
'The Blessed Damosel,' and many others. During his later years he earned a
large income, and he lived in a large house in Cheyne Row, Chelsea (near
Carlyle), where for a while, as long as his irregular habits permitted, the
novelist George Meredith and the poet Swinburne were also inmates. He
gradually grew more morbid, and became a rather pitiful victim of insomnia,
the drug chloral, and spiritualistic delusions about his wife. He died in
1882.

Rossetti's poetry is absolutely unlike that of any other English poet, and
the difference is clearly due in large part to his Italian race and his
painter's instinct. He has, in the didactic sense, absolutely no religious,
moral, or social interests; he is an artist almost purely for art's sake,
writing to give beautiful embodiment to moods, experiences, and striking
moments. If it is true of Tennyson, however, that he stands aloof from
actual life, this is far truer of Rossetti. His world is a vague and
languid region of enchantment, full of whispering winds, indistinct forms
of personified abstractions, and the murmur of hidden streams; its
landscape sometimes bright, sometimes shadowy, but always delicate,
exquisitely arranged for luxurious decorative effect. In his
ballad-romances, to be sure, such as, 'The King's Tragedy,' there is much
dramatic vigor; yet there is still more of medieval weirdness. Rossetti,
like Dante, has much of spiritual mysticism, and his interest centers in
the inner rather than the outer life; but his method, that of a painter and
a southern Italian, is always highly sensuous. His melody is superb and
depends partly on a highly Latinized vocabulary, archaic pronunciations,
and a delicate genius in sound-modulation, the effect being heightened also
by frequent alliteration and masterly use of refrains. 'Sister Helen,'
obviously influenced by the popular ballad 'Edward, Edward,' derives much
of its tremendous tragic power from the refrain, and in the use of this
device is perhaps the most effective poem in the world. Rossetti is
especially facile also with the sonnet. His sonnet sequence, 'The House of
Life,' one of the most notable in English, exalts earthly Love as the
central force in the world and in rather fragmentary fashion traces the
tragic influence of Change in both life and love.

WILLIAM MORRIS. William Morris, a man of remarkable versatility and
tremendous energy, which expressed themselves in poetry and many other
ways, was the son of a prosperous banker, and was born in London in 1834.
At Oxford in 1853-55 he became interested in medieval life and art, was
stimulated by the poetry of Mrs. Browning and Tennyson, became a friend of
Burne-Jones, wrote verse and prose, and was a member of a group called 'The
Brotherhood,' while a little later published for a year a monthly magazine
not unlike 'The Germ.' He apprenticed himself to an architect, but at the
same time also practised several decorative arts, such as woodcarving,
illuminating manuscripts, and designing furniture, stained glass and
embroidery. Together with Burne-Jones, moreover, he became an enthusiastic
pupil of Rossetti in painting. His first volume of verse, 'The Defence of
Guinevere and Other Poems,' put forth in 1858, shows the influence of
Rossetti and Pre-Raphaelitism, but it mainly gives vivid presentation to
the spirit of fourteenth-century French chivalry. In 1861 came the
foundation of the decorative-art firm of Morris and Co. (above, p. 337),
which after some years grew into a large business, continued to be Morris'
main occupation to the end of his life, and has exercised a great
influence, both in England and elsewhere, on the beautifying of the
surroundings of domestic life.

Meanwhile Morris had turned to the writing of long narrative poems, which
he composed with remarkable fluency. The most important is the series of
versions of Greek and Norse myths and legends which appeared in 1868-70 as
'The Earthly Paradise.' Shortly after this he became especially interested
in Icelandic literature and published versions of some of its stories;
notably one of the Siegfried tale, 'Sigurd the Volsung.' In the decade from
1880 to 1890 he devoted most of his energy to work for the Socialist party,
of which he became a leader. His ideals were largely identical with those
of Ruskin; in particular he wished to restore (or create) in the lives of
workingmen conditions which should make of each of them an independent
artist. The practical result of his experience was bitter disappointment,
he was deposed from his leadership, finally abandoned the party, and
returned to art and literature. He now published a succession of prose
romances largely inspired by the Icelandic sagas and composed in a strange
half-archaic style. He also established the 'Kelmscott Press,' which he
made famous for its production of elaborate artistic editions of great
books. He died in 1896.

Morris' shorter poems are strikingly dramatic and picturesque, and his
longer narrations are remarkably facile and often highly pleasing. His
facility, however, is his undoing. He sometimes wrote as much as eight
hundred lines in a day, and he once declared: 'If a chap can't compose an
epic poem while he's weaving tapestry, he had better shut up; he'll never
do any good at all.' In reading his work one always feels that there is the
material of greatness, but perhaps nothing that he wrote is strictly great.
His prose will certainly prove less permanent than his verse.

SWINBURNE. A younger disciple of the Pre-Raphaelite Movement but also a
strongly original artist was Algernon Charles Swinburne. Born in 1837 into
a wealthy family, the son of an admiral, he devoted himself throughout his
life wholly to poetry, and his career was almost altogether devoid of
external incident. After passing through Eton and Oxford he began as author
at twenty-three by publishing two plays imitative of Shakspere. Five years
later he put forth 'Atalanta in Calydon,' a tragedy not only drawn from
Greek heroic legend, but composed in the ancient Greek manner, with long
dialogs and choruses. These two volumes express the two intensely vigorous
forces which were strangely combined in his nature; for while no man has
ever been a more violent romanticist than Swinburne, yet, as one critic has
said, 'All the romantic riot in his blood clamored for Greek severity and
Greek restraint.' During the next fifteen years he was partly occupied with
a huge poetic trilogy in blank verse on Mary Queen of Scots, and from time
to time he wrote other dramas and much prose criticism, the latter largely
in praise of the Elizabethan dramatists and always wildly extravagant in
tone. He produced also some long narrative poems, of which the chief is
'Tristram of Lyonesse.' His chief importance, however, is as a lyric poet,
and his lyric production was large. His earlier poems in this category are
for the most part highly objectionable in substance or sentiment, but he
gradually worked into a better vein. He was a friend of George Meredith,
Burne-Jones, Morris, Rossetti (to whom he loyally devoted himself for
years), and the painter Whistler. He died in 1909.

Swinburne carried his radicalism into all lines. Though an ardently
patriotic Englishman, he was an extreme republican; and many of his poems
are dedicated to the cause of Italian independence or to liberty in
general. The significance of his thought, however, is less than that of any
other English poet who can in any sense be called great; his poetry is
notable chiefly for its artistry, especially for its magnificent melody.
Indeed, it has been cleverly said that he offers us an elaborate service of
gold and silver, but with little on it except salt and pepper. In his case,
however, the mere external beauty and power often seem their own complete
and satisfying justification. His command of different meters is marvelous;
he uses twice as many as Browning, who is perhaps second to him in this
respect, and his most characteristic ones are those of gloriously rapid
anapestic lines with complicated rime-schemes. Others of his distinctive
traits are lavish alliteration, rich sensuousness, grandiose vagueness of
thought and expression, a great sweep of imagination, and a corresponding
love of vastness and desolation. He makes much decorative use of Biblical
imagery and of vague abstract personifications--in general creates an
atmosphere similar to that of Rossetti. Somewhat as in the case of Morris,
his fluency is almost fatal--he sometimes pours out his melodious but vague
emotion in forgetfulness of all proportion and restraint. From the
intellectual and spiritual point of view he is nearly negligible, but as a
musician in words he has no superior, not even Shelley.

OTHER VICTORIA POETS. Among the other Victorian poets, three, at least,
must be mentioned. Arthur Hugh Clough (1819-1861), tutor at Oxford and
later examiner in the government education office, expresses the spiritual
doubt and struggle of the period in noble poems similar to those of Matthew
Arnold, whose fine elegy 'Thyrsis' commemorates him. Edward Fitzgerald
(1809-1883), Irish by birth, an eccentric though kind-hearted recluse, and
a friend of Tennyson, is known solely for his masterly paraphrase (1859) of
some of the Quatrains of the skeptical eleventh-century Persian
astronomer-poet Omar Khayyam. The similarity of temper between the medieval
oriental scholar and the questioning phase of the Victorian period is
striking (though the spirit of Fitzgerald's verse is no doubt as much his
own as Omar's), and no poetry is more poignantly beautiful than the best of
this. Christina Rossetti (1830-94), the sister of Dante Gabriel Rossetti,
lived in London with her mother in the greatest seclusion, occupied with an
ascetic devotion to the English Church, with her poetry, and with the
composition, secondarily, of prose articles and short stories. Her poetry
is limited almost entirely to the lyrical expression of her spiritual
experiences, much of it is explicitly religious, and all of it is religious
in feeling. It is tinged with the Pre-Raphaelite mystic medievalism; and a
quiet and most affecting sadness is its dominant trait; but the power and
beauty of a certain small part of it perhaps entitle her to be called the
chief of English poetesses.

THE NOVEL. THE EARLIER SECONDARY NOVELISTS. To Scott's position of
unquestioned supremacy among romancers and novelists Charles Dickens
succeeded almost immediately on Scott's death, but certain secondary early
Victorian novelists may be considered before him. In the lives of two of
these, Bulwer-Lytton and Benjamin Disraeli, there are interesting
parallels. Both were prominent in politics, both began writing as young men
before the commencement of the Victorian period, and both ended their
literary work only fifty years later. Edward Bulwer, later created Sir
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, and finally raised to the peerage as Lord Lytton
(1803-1873), was almost incredibly fluent and versatile. Much of his life a
member of Parliament and for a while of the government, he was a vigorous
pamphleteer. His sixty or more really literary works are of great variety;
perhaps the best known of them are his second novel, the trifling 'Pelham'
(1828), which inaugurated a class of so-called 'dandy' novels, giving
sympathetic presentation to the more frivolous social life of the 'upper'
class, and the historical romances 'The Last Days of Pompeii' (1834) and
'Harold' (1843). In spite of his real ability, Bulwer was a poser and
sentimentalist, characteristics for which he was vigorously ridiculed by
Thackeray. Benjamin Disraeli, [Footnote: The second syllable is pronounced
like the word 'rail' and has the accent, so that the whole name is
Disraily.] later Earl of Beaconsfield (1804-1881), a much less prolific
writer, was by birth a Jew. His immature earliest novel, 'Vivian Grey'
(1826), deals, somewhat more sensibly, with the same social class as
Bulwer's 'Pelham.' In his novels of this period, as in his dress and
manner, he deliberately attitudinized, a fact which in part reflected a
certain shallowness of character, in part was a device to attract attention
for the sake of his political ambition. After winning his way into
Parliament he wrote in 1844-7 three political novels,' Coningsby,' 'Sybil,'
and 'Tancred,' which set forth his Tory creed of opposition to the
dominance of middle-class Liberalism. For twenty-five years after this he
was absorbed in the leadership of his party, and he at last became Prime
Minister. In later life he so far returned to literature as to write two
additional novels.

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