GRAP Undergraduate Library PR 4231 ∙559 BUHR First Published in 1923 (All Rights Reserved) PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN 518568-250 BUHR tr. to 9-30-97 PREFACE THE aim of the author, in bringing together biography, kindred thought, quotation, and paraphrase in the volumes "Robert Browning: the Poet and the Man," and "Robert Browning: Poet and Philosopher," was to attempt to place the poet in direct relation to his poetry, by bringing together utterances of related value and concurrence of contemporary points of view, which would throw light upon his work and place it in right perspective, as a work of art requires. To present the poems in chronological order in the setting of personal history and public event; to permit the poet to speak for himself; to present nothing but firsthand report of him during his lifetime; to attempt to present the poet as no feather-bed philosopher, but one in whom genius dawned "with throes and stings," was the aim of the author, however imperfectly accomplished. The auto-psychical assumption opened the long poems of Browning to the author-it may do so for others. "The subjective poet," says Browning, "digs where he stands" (Essay on Shelley). "The only difference between a true poet and his poetry," says Francis Thompson in a note affixed to his Essay on Shelley, "is just the difference between two states of the one man; between the metal live from the forge and the metal chill. But chill or glowing, the metal is equally the same." Browning himself, in his Essay on Shelley, pointed the path by which to arrive at an understanding of him: "In our approach to the poetry we necessarily approach the personality of the poet; in apprehending it we apprehend him, and certainly we cannot love it without loving him. Both for love's and for understanding's sake we desire to know him, and as readers of his poetry must be readers of his biography too." Emerson asserts that the only biographer of Shakespeare is Shakespeare, and similarly is Browning the only biographer of Browning-of the secret sources of his own genius. "But even Shakespeare can tell us nothing," says Emerson, says Emerson, "except to the Shakespeare in us. Browning's selection of the soul as subject for his art, the developments of a soul-"little else," he declared, was worth study "-was inexplicable to the dominant thought of his day. It could scarcely credit him with being sincere. "In vacancy," he writes in "Christmas Eve and Easter Day," "I pour this story." 66 'But," says Carlyle, "how often have we seen some adventurous and perhaps much censured wanderer light on some outlying neglected yet vitally momentous province, the hidden treasures of which he first discovered and kept proclaiming till the general eye and effort were directed thither and the conquest was complete, thereby in these his seemingly so aimless rambles planting new standards, founding new habitable colonies in the immeasurable circumambient realms of Nothingness and Night." FRANCES M. SIM. DUNEDIN, NEW ZEALAND, June 18th, 1923. |