ROBERT BROWNING AND THE ARABESQUE IN ART. A LECTURE DELIVERED TO THE SENIOR CLASS IN ARTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA. BY FELIX E. SCHELLING, A. M., ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH LITERATURE IN THE UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA. 1890. THE following words were completed some days before the recent news of Mr. Browning's death. Of Mr. Browning, the man, it becomes us not yet to speak; the memory of him belongs to those into whose personal grief it would be only an impertinence for a stranger to inquire. Time has not yet made the author's life the inheritance of the public. Mr. Browning's life has been all that could be wished, and here is neither time nor place for an obtrusive eulogy of that life. But Robert Browning, the author, has been long the common property of us all. His works have been so long before us, and his name has been so lauded and linked with the immortals that have gone before, that death can add little to an apotheosis already so complete. To speak of him in praise or in dispraise has been long a fashion among us, and the accident of his recent demise can assuredly make no further utterance unfitting. It is yet too soon to attempt an estimate of this life of prolonged literary activity, or to seek for the explanation of a contemporary reputation almost unexampled in the annals of literature; but it can never be impertinent to add-if not to the adulation that streams from a thousand altars—at least a word to the better understanding of a figure, which, however taste may change, must always be regarded as one of the most prominent and interesting of our century. Moreover, the extraordinary prominence which Mr. Browning's followers have long claimed for him, a claim which has sought to dethrone all the poets of our tongue, save the prince of poets himself, is in itself a challenge to all men to speak; and if, as has been said, Mr. Browning has divided the critics into two hostile camps, so portentous a power may well stand for a subject of attention at any time. (iii) I. ROBERT BROWNING AND THE POETRY OF THE FUTURE. THERE is, perhaps, no more perilous position into which a man may thrust himself, than to stand forth as a prophet. To acknowledge the general prevalence of astigmatism and other visual disorders, but add that they are confined to our neighbors; to claim for ourselves not only a clearer vision as to things past and present, but to arrogate an ability to rend the shadowy veil of futurity, and foretell, to a nicety, the trend of coming events: these are the perilous assumptions of the prophet. It is not, therefore, as a prophet that I stand before you this evening; nor have I chosen my subject to the end of a miserable quibble that the poetry of Mr. Browning is as comprehensible as the yet unwritten poetry of the future. The future is quite as impenetrable to me as to most men. I would only look outward, towards the horizon, instead of inward, at the minute and secret mechanism of the poet's brain. In short, I would seek to gaze with you for a moment-using what glasses we may-on that mighty firmament in which the creations of Robert Browning move and have their being; now shining as some bright particular star, and again wandering in courses as erratic as those of the planets themselves. Without doubt here are many luminous points, and the deeps, be they naught or the infinite assemblage of stars too distant and too thickly clustered for average sight, are among the deeps of infinity itself. Far be it from me to deny the imperative necessity of minute and critical reading. Above all things let us first read our authors and thus lessen that greatest of the literary evils of our age, the reading about books. And yet, perhaps, Mr. Browning has been, on the whole, far too minutely read, to the exclusion of a more general estimate based upon a broad comparison of his actual achievements with those of the masters of English poetry. Let us, therefore, for the nonce, be not over particular of quibbles, lest, in the deciphering of some curious hiero (5) |