United States or Sierra Leone ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
This was in 1863, when Browning had published Men and Women, and Dramatic Lyrics. However, he admitted Skelton's article on the other side, and added, with magnificent candour, that "to this generation Browning's poetry is as uninteresting as Shakespeare's Sonnets were to the last century." The most fervent Browningite could have said no more than that. To Mr.
"They are our life," Joan argued, "one has to worry and work things out for oneself." "You are a Browningite," laughed Miss Abercrombie; she glanced up sideways at her companion. "'As it were better youth Should strive through acts uncouth Towards making, than repose on aught found made. He is right in a way, though, mind you, I don't know that it pays women to do much in the struggling line."
He felt, however, that before the public he must stand aloof from its work: "as Wilkes was no Wilkeite," he wrote to Edmund Yates, "I am quite other than a Browningite." With a little nervousness as to the discretion which the Society might or might not show, he felt grateful for the interest in his writings demonstrated by persons many of whom had been unknown to him even by name.
Now the admirers and opponents of Browning alike make him out to be a pedant rather than a poet. The only difference between the Browningite and the anti-Browningite, is that the second says he was not a poet but a mere philosopher, and the first says he was a philosopher and not a mere poet.
Joan dressed quickly; the faint aroma of happiness which her sleep had brought her, and which amounted to cheerfulness, stayed with her. She remembered how Miss Abercrombie had once said to her: "Oh, you are a Browningite," and smiled at the phrase, repeating to herself another verse of the same poem: "And I shall thereupon Take rest ere I be gone, Once more on my adventure brave and new."
Although to an ordinary and uninspired intellect it may appear perfectly obvious that a lyric means simply and clearly what it says, the true Browningite is better informed. He is deeply aware that if the poet seems to say one thing, this is proof indisputable that another is intended.
For his followers are pre-eminently intellectuals, and there never lived upon the earth a great man who was so fundamentally different from his followers. Indeed, he felt this heartily and even humorously himself. "Wilkes was no Wilkite," he said, "and I am very far from being a Browningite."
It was just after the appearance of my story of David Gray in the Cornhill that I first met, at the Priory, North Bank, with Robert Browning. It was an odd and representative gathering of men, only one lady being present, the hostess, George Eliot. I was never much of a hero-worshipper; but I had long been a sympathetic Browningite, and I well remember George Eliot taking me aside after my first tête-
Word Of The Day