Romances_. But of Browning's original "fifty men and women," nearly half
were lovers or occupied with love. Such fertility was natural enough in
the first years of a supremely happy marriage, crowning an early manhood
in which love of any kind had, for better or worse, played hardly any
part at all. Yet almost nothing in these beautiful and often brilliant
lyrics is in any strict sense personal. The biographer who searches them
for traits quivering with intimate experience searches all but in vain.
Browning's own single and supreme passion touched no fountain of song,
such as love sets flowing in most poets and in many who are not poets:
even the memorable months of 1845-46 provoked no Sonnets "_to_ the
Portuguese." His personal story impresses itself upon his poetry only
through the preoccupation which it induces with the love-stories of
other people, mostly quite unlike his own. The white light of his own
perfect union broke from that prismatic intellect of his in a poetry
brilliant with almost every other hue. No English poet of his century,
and few of any other, have made love seem so wonderful; but he
habitually takes this wonder bruised and jostled in the grip of
thwarting conditions. In his way of approaching love Browning strangely
blends the mystic's exaltation with the psychologist's cool penetrating
scrutiny of its accompanying phenomena, its favourable or impeding
conditions. The keen analytic accent of Paracelsus mingles with the
ecstatic unearthly note of Shelley. "Love is all" might have served as
the text for the whole volume of Browning's love-poetry; but the text is
wrought out with an amazingly acute vision for all the things which are
not love. "Love triumphing over the world" might have been the motto for
most of the love-poems in _Men and Women_; but some would have had to be
assigned to the opposite rubric, "The world triumphing over love."
Sometimes Love's triumph is, for Browning, the rapture of complete
union, for which all outer things exist only by subduing themselves to
its mood and taking its hue; sometimes it is the more ascetic and