Book-bot.com - read famous books online for free

Robert Browning by C. H. (Charles Harold) Herford
page 42 of 284 (14%)
Browning's _Strafford_, like his _Paracelsus_, was a serious attempt to
interpret a historic character; and historic experts like Gardiner have,
as regards the central figure, emphatically indorsed his judgment. The
other persons, and the action itself, he treated more freely, with
evident regard to their value as secondary elements in the portrayal of
Stafford; and it is easy to trace in the whole manner of his innovations
the well-marked ply of his mind. The harsh and rugged fanaticisms, the
splendid frivolities, of the seventeenth century, fade and lose
substance in an atmosphere charged with idealism and self-consciousness.
Generous self-devotion is not the universal note, but it is the
prevailing key, that in which the writer most naturally thinks and most
readily invents. Strafford's devotion to Charles and Pym's to his
country were historical; but Browning accentuates Pym's heroism by
making the man he sends to the scaffold his old friend; and devotion is
the single trait of the beautiful but imaginary character of Lucy
Carlisle. "Give me your notion of a thorough self-devotement,
self-forgetting," he wrote a few years later to Miss Flower: the idea
seems to have been already busy moulding his still embryonic invention
of character. Something of the visionary exaltation of the dying
Paracelsus thus hangs over the final scene in which Strafford goes to
meet the fate which the one friend imposes on him and the other cannot
turn aside. All the characters have something of the "deep
self-consciousness" of the author of _Pauline_. Not that they are, any
of them, drawn with very profound grasp of human nature or a many-sided
apprehension of life. They are either absolutely simple, like Lady
Carlisle, or built upon a rivalry or conflict of simple elements, like
Strafford and Charles; but there is so much restless vivacity in their
discourse, the broad surface of mood is so incessantly agitated by the
play and cross-play of thought and feeling, that they seem more complex
than they are.
DigitalOcean Referral Badge