Switzerland must present to the world; that is the mission imposed upon her by nature. It is worth the while to live in a country destined to so noble a trial.”

We Americans may therefore well send our congratulations to the Lake of

Lucerne at this season, where the inhabitants of the oldest republic in existence are celebrating their great anniversary, wishing the brave little nation Godspeed on her mission, and another six centuries of self-government. W. D. McCrackan.

THE well-known reluctance of Browning to admit the public to a view of his private life, shown by the care he took in sheltering his wife's memory from the revelations of a biographer, and by the destruction of his own letters and other papers which might have illustrated his career and the development of his genius, has led to an expectation of rather a meagre and dry biography; and it is a welcome surprise to find Mrs. Orr's work so interesting as it is. The absence hitherto of any Life of Mrs. Browning which could make a fair claim to be authoritative is greatly advantageous to the present volumes; for we have in them an account of both authors, and the relations between them and the contrast of their characters were such that the interest of each is much enhanced. The personality of Mrs. Browning, too, found expression in her letters far more than was the case with her husband, and the description of their domestic life comes more gracefully from her pen. Those whom she has attached by her poems, or whom womanhood naturally attracts, may well find her confidences to her friends the most entertaining portion of this work, and value it as much for her sake as for the poet's. She gives, at least, the main human interest to it; and in comparison with the chapters dealing with Browning's life before his marriage

1 Life and Letters of Robert Browning. By Mrs. SUTHERLAND ORR. In two volumes. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co. 1891.

and after his loss of her, these which she contributes have a vitality and directness that set them in high relief. She reveals herself; but of Browning we have only a portrait which Mrs. Orr has drawn, and which results from many minute touches, made with painstaking care and fidelity to fact, but requiring much attention from the reader in order to comprehend it and give it the wholeness of a personal impression.

In the opening chapters Mrs. Orr prepares the reader for some modification of the popular conception of Browning. It is a minor though an important matter that she sets at rest the suggestion of any Jewish or negro strain in his blood inheritance. The stock was English, so far as can be known, except by his mother, who was "the true type of a Scottish gentlewoman," Carlyle said, and who was of German descent on her father's side. The notion that Browning was a person of great physical vitality, and in some way peculiarly "manly," is one that will not so readily yield to a different view; for it is a part of the secret of his attraction for women. It would be almost "grotesque," Mrs. Orr thinks, "to say that only a delicate woman could have been the mother of Robert Browning; " but his mother was such a woman, and transmitted to her son, in the author's opinion, a "slow and not strong pulse," a marked “ nervousness of nature," which appears to have been the ground of his temperament,

and in general infused into his physique an element of weakness, sensibility, and consciousness of pain which powerfully modified the perfect health which should have descended to him from his father's family. This is observable at once in "the fiery child and the impatient boy" whom she describes, with his precocity of talent, his restlessness, and what we should call his unmanageableness in many ways. His education was carefully attended to by his father, a man of bookish tastes; somewhat whimsical, perhaps, but evidently proud of his son, and well pleased to support him in an unprofitable literary career. The boy's social circle was narrow, and of the sort in which a youthful prodigy would easily develop independence and conceit. The tastes which filled his after life were early cultivated. He wrote his first book of poems at twelve years, and be fore he was out of his boyhood he had composed music for songs, shared in theatrical representations, and shown an inclination for art.

It is possibly more important still to notice his early interest in religious speculation. He was brought up in a somewhat narrow school of religion, and in his childhood, under the tutelage of his mother, was subjected to a strain of feeling which seems to have been premature. He had no sooner come to his first thinking for himself than he revolted from what he had been taught, and, finding in the early poems of Shelley the reflection of his own state of mind, he "became a professing atheist," and, humorously following his youthful guide, "a practicing vegetarian." Two years of the vegetable diet satisfied him in that part of the field, but he remained unsettled in religion; and even in mature life, while believing in a direct relation with the Creator and professing a certain faith, there was still so large an element of skepticism in his mind that Mrs. Orr frankly pronounces him "heterodox" and a disbeliever in any

such revelation as Christianity affirms. At first the only effect of these novel views was to intensify his independence, aggressiveness, and general defiance of those about him, to the distress of his mother, to whom he was fondly attached. It was an unamiable period in his life, so much so that in later years he was unwilling to dwell upon his youth and early manhood. "I am better now," he used to say, when the attempt was made to direct his memory to those days.

Shelley's influence is also clearly perceptible in the inspiration of the early poem Pauline, but Browning's own genius soon passed from the reflective (it is too much to call it imitative) stage. In Paracelsus, the dramas, and Bells and Pomegranates he showed his qualities and those modes of mental action and imagination which were most native to him and remained permanent. He was young, and had the defects of youth, both in the use of his talents and in his character; but his work was sufficiently distinguished to secure his mingling with literary men, and his individuality was attractive enough to engage their good will. He was ambitious, keen for success and fame, and admired the "hero in literature" from the start. Self-assertive, with a will and a way of his own, evidently full to overflowing of selfconsciousness, he did not perhaps make the best impression upon all he met; but Carlyle knew and liked him in those days; others were kindly disposed toward him, and Macready, at least, was his friend. He had been to Russia and to Italy, and in Sordello he had written the most characteristic of his first works, and with it he closed the period of immaturity in thought and art. He had not, however, won acceptance with the public; his literary acquaintance had not helped his vogue, a fact of which he afterwards complained; at most, his friendship with Macready had encouraged his dramatic faculty and got his plays acted. The most striking thing

in all this early period, lasting until past his thirtieth year, is specially brought out by Mrs. Orr: he made no warm friendships, and in general his emotional life was slight. This implies a self-concentration unusual in degree, and an absence, or at least a feebleness, of that form of passion which has been associated with his individuality.

The romance of his own life began with his acquaintance with Miss Barrett, to whom Mr. Kenyon, her cousin, known too as a friend of Wordsworth and other literary men, introduced him. She was an invalid, and received him always lying down. Her family believed her to be in a decline, and marriage would seem to have been the least likely thing in the world for her. Browning saw her three times a week, and corresponded with her; and finally, acting impulsively, he proposed marriage. At this critical moment the family physician advised a winter in the south of Europe as the only means of prolonging her life, and her father refused his consent to such a journey. He thought her case was hopeless. She decided, therefore, knowing that she could not win her father's approval, to elope with Browning. They were secretly married, with the knowledge of only her sisters; and a week later Mrs. Browning stole away while the family were at dinner, joined her husband and went abroad with him. It was certainly a very grave responsibility that Browning took, and that Mrs. Browning allowed him to take; but none of the serious consequences that were most probable occurred. She never recovered her health, but she became much better, and at times was able to join in an out-of-doors existence that she could never have anticipated. In Italy she found life, and to keep it they were obliged to live there. They were very happy, and Browning, on his side, was a thoroughly good husband to his invalid wife, considerate, attentive, and devoted. Their life, however, with its frequent

changes of residence and its cares, was not favorable to his poetical productiveness. Mrs. Orr thinks that he felt the weakening effects of the climate, and his constitution was not fitted to sustain them without real loss of energy. It is to be remembered that he had not met with recognition in poetry. With his new friends, the Storys, he was diverted from literature to an amateurish work in drawing and modeling. Perhaps no better impression of the final effect upon him can be given than by a quotation from one of his wife's letters near the end of their life together :

"Robert has made his third bust copied from the antique. He breaks them all up as they are finished - it's only matter of education. When the power of execution is achieved, he will try at something original. Then reading hurts him; as long as I have known him he has not been able to read long at a time

he can do it now better than at the beginning. The consequence of which is that an active occupation is salvation to him. . . . Nobody exactly understands him except me, who am in the inside of him and hear him breathe. . . . He had a room all last summer, and did nothing. Then he worked himself out by riding for three or four hours together. There has been little poetry done since last winter, when he did much. He was not inclined to write this winter. The modeling combines body-work and soul-work, and the more tired he has been, and the more his back ached, poor fellow, the more he has exulted and been happy."

The ease with which his wife wrote may have been a discouraging contrast, though he rejoiced in her success. He thought she had the more inspired genius. "Can't you imagine," he writes, "a clever sort of angel who plots and plans, and tries to build up something

he wants to make you see it as he sees it shows you one point of view, carries you off to another, hammering into your head the thing he wants you

the points at which he was out of touch with Christianity, and emphasizes the incongruities in his religious ideas and feelings. She uses criticism very freely throughout the work to give full prominence to whatever of personal meaning his poems can be made to convey. It is all very interesting, always able, though in our judgment it is not always convincing. Some of it must prove perplexing to the devout admirer of Browning. The most special matter is her belief that he studied Pompilia in his wife's nature, and that this character, which Mrs. Orr thinks his "masterpiece," is an instance of "reflected inspiration." She bases this opinion upon the feebleness of Browning's parental instinct, "the weakest in his nature," -and supports it as follows: "The ingenuously unbounded maternal pride, the almost luscious maternal sentiment, of Pompilia's dying moments can only associate themselves in our mind with Mrs. Browning's personal utterances, and some notable passages in Casa Guidi Windows and Aurora Leigh. Even the exalted fervor of the invocation to Caponsacchi, its blending of spiritual ecstasy with half-realized earthly emotion, has, I think, no parallel in her husband's work."

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This is interesting in itself, and also in its connection with Browning's relation to women. He was always a "woman's man." He preferred the society of women to that of men, made them his confidantes, and appears have held a somewhat unconventional attitude toward them. Mrs. Orr thinks he never understood the essential difference in their position and point of view that their sex makes. It should be added that he supported the woman suffrage movement until near the end of his life.

It would carry this notice to an unreasonable length to attempt to gather up the various statements that are made about Browning's traits, the nature they

inhered in and the character that resulted. It is enough to say that he showed at the end of his career, as at the beginning, that natural irritability or "nervousness of nature" which made him impatient, hard to differ from amiably, excitable, effusive in manner, and in general what is called impulsive. He enjoyed his fame to the full, and was sensible of the honors done him. He thought his last works the best. He was constant in his friendships, and he prized them more as life went on. His later London life appears to have been, on the whole, the most congenial to him. He shows the marks of its influence. To what extent the late recognition of his work affected his genius unfavorably by making him indifferent to criticism in the higher sense is a curious question. His individuality was perhaps strong enough to have resisted all modification, and as he was plainly without that artistic sense on which the faculty of selfcriticism depends, the criticism of others, whether express or felt merely in the reaction of an author's audience upon himself, might have been useless to him. It appears that his learning was much less than has been supposed. In thought he never passed beyond the vague sphere in which his early poems moved, but he became increasingly interested in incident and character, and in his study of them he accomplished the better part of his non-lyrical work. It is curious that this interest should have been so specialized as it was and limited to particular cases; he did not care for history, that is, for humanity in the abstract or the collective form. This is connected with that defective human sympathy on which Mrs. Orr remarks. In the light of these volumes much Browning criticism will have to be rewritten, and by that light all such criticism may be made more searching and exact. Whether Browning's reputation, on the personal side, will gain or lose by the biography is, we think, doubtful.