When, in an episode in the long courtship by mail between Browning and Elizabeth Barrett, Elizabeth “confessed” that she was to be numbered, in religion, among “those schismatiques of Amsterdam” Donne talks of, Browning, always the opportunist in the affair, fired back: “Can it be you, my own you past putting away, you are a schismatic and frequenter of Independent Dissenting Chapels? And you confess this to me—whose father and mother went this morning to the very Independent Chapel where they took me, all these years back, to be baptized—and where they heard, this morning, a sermon preached by the very minister who officiated on that other occasion!” The Independent Chapel in question was, of course, the Locks Fields Chapel, or, as it came to be called, the York Street Congregational Church, at Walworth, about a mile from the Brownings' Camberwell home, south of London; and the minister was a George Clayton. Browning's credentials as a schismatic were, however, less obvious than he implies. On his father's side Browning's people, in fact, were members of the Church of England (his grandmother was the daughter of an Anglican clergyman), and in the 1830's he and his sister also attended evening services at Camden Chapel, a separate offshoot from the parish church of St. Giles, in order to hear the more “eloquent and earnest” sermons of Henry Melvill, “Melvill of the Golden Mouth,” whose sermons were also highly approved by John Ruskin. If Clayton's Independent Chapel was nonetheless the family church, there can be no doubt that this was because of the influence of Browning's mother, already a member there before marriage. About 1820, her husband, raised in the Church of England, followed her and officially joined the York Street Congregation.

The eight plays Robert Browning wrote before Men and Women (1855) are the least read and, by common consent, the least successful of his works, but they deserve attention from anyone interested in Browning's ideas. In agreeing that the blame must be divided between the “romantic temper of the age” and the poet's “inability to objectify conflict,” critics have dismissed Browning's dramatic efforts as “laboratory experiments” which taught him mainly that he could never be a dramatist and should restrict himself to psychological analysis in poetry. But if Browning was uncertain about how to say what he wanted, he was not at all uncertain about what he wanted to say, and a study of the repeated patterns of theme and characterization in the plays shows that the experience of writing for the stage provided an invaluable opportunity for him to work out his developing moral philosophy. The demands of stage presentation forced him to crystallize his unresolved ethical theories and led him to that study of motivation without which the great character studies of Men and Women could not have been written.

Nobody will again consider Paracelsus “the work that posterity will probably estimate as Browning's greatest.” Too much critical attention has elucidated its shortcomings. Nonetheless, the amount of comment that it has provoked indicates its importance in Browning's canon. Most of this comment deals with Browning's theme; much deals exclusively with the relation between Paracelsus and Aprile; and a few commentators have attempted to evaluate the place of Paracelsus in Browning's artistic evolution. But, surprisingly, outside of C. Willard Smith's provocative but narrowly-focused study of the star-imagery in Paracelsus and a few passing comments by J. Hillis Miller, William O. Raymond, and F. S. Boas, little attention has concentrated on imagery in the drama. Park Honan, perhaps overly evaluating the drama by the light of Browning's later achievement, says that “one feels again and again its almost total irrelevance to character” and refers to it as “superfluous adornment.” However, tracing several of the image patterns of Paracelsus through their development and seeing how they interweave illustrates that imagery plays a functional role in integrating form, character portrayal, and theme, thereby throwing additional light on Browning's artistry.

My personal acquaintance with Robert Browning began in July, 1881, when I first visited him in his London house, 19 Warwick Crescent, W., having received a note from him, inviting me to visit him on a Sunday morning, “the crowded end of the London season pressing heavily on us all,” he said.

In the “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” Keats describes how, in the moment of contemplation, the poet is conscious of his limitations as an earthbound creature, one of a generation which “old age shall … waste,” one who has felt the moment of “human passion … / That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy'd, / A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.” By contrast, the urn suggests the power of art to prolong the moment, to render permanent what is transitory, to recreate endlessly for one generation after the next the passion of human love. But the urn itself may not last forever; it is a “sylvan historian” which is itself the product of the “slow time” of human history, an artifact which commemorates a moment in the life of its creator and emulates eternity without itself being eternal (“Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought / As doth eternity …”). It is a “still unravish'd bride of quietness,” but if we dwell on the ambiguous “still,” we sense that like the Elgin marbles, the urn may be subject to “the rude / Wasting of old Time,” a hint at the “magnitude of eternity” which impresses on the poet a sense of his mortality.

Over the years Browning's poem “Saul,” which he himself chose as one of his finest lyrics, has received much critical attention. It has been analyzed as showing the development of Browning's religious beliefs between 1845 and 1855, as an inductive approach to religious experience, as a typological account of man's growth in history toward Christianity, as an expression of Browning's Evangelical faith in the Incarnation, as an example of his use of the past to comment on the present, and as a dynamic statement of his emotional mysticism. Its rising structure and sequence of ideas have been related to Christopher Smart's “Song to David” and “Ode to Musick on St. Cecilia's Day,” to Wyatt's “Seven Penitential Psalms,” and to various minor eighteenth- and nineteenth-century works on Saul. Without contradicting this earlier criticism, we should like to suggest another possible source of idea, structure, and image. To read “Saul” in the light of the Platonic, Neoplatonic, or Hermetic tradition's concept of four hierarchical levels or stages of mystic vision can add, we believe, a new and intriguing dimension to the interpretation and appreciation of the poem's structure and significance.

This morning—the last of the dying year—all that was mortal of Robert Browning was borne from the old home at 29, De Veregardens, Kensington, to the stately Abbey at Westminster. The body had been lying encased in an air-tight coffin, covered by a purple satin pall edged with gold lace, surrounded by wreaths. So numerous were the wreaths that subsequently the hearse could not contain them, and a couple of vehicles had to be employed to convey them.

William Irvine and Park Honan, whose biography of Browning is the weightier of the books before me, have the first qualification for those who venture into this field—an unquestioning confidence that an extended account of Browning's life will be of interest and value. Before I examine the grounds for this confidence, it is right to acknowledge that there will be very many readers, especially of this publication, who share the authors' initial assumption, and to give for the benefit of these readers an account of what they will find in the book.