Browning, with the poet’s instant insight, read the essential story of his boyhood into the lines:
“... Dreaming, blindfold led
By visionary hand, did soul’s advance
Precede my body’s, gain inheritance
Of fact by fancy...?”
No transcription of the poet’s childhood could even suggest the fortunate influences surrounding him that did not emphasize the rare culture and original power of his father. The elder Browning was familiar with old French and with both Spanish and Italian literature. “His wonderful store of information might really be compared to an inexhaustible mine,” said one who knew him well.
It is easy to see how out of such an atmosphere the future poet drew unconsciously the power to weave his “magic web” of such poems as the “Parleyings,” “Abt Vogler,” “Ferishtah’s Fancies,” and was lured on into that realm of marvelous creation out of which sprang his transcendent masterpiece, “The Ring and the Book.”
The elder Browning’s impassioned love of books was instanced by the curious fact that he could go in the dark to his library, and out of many hundreds of volumes select some particular one to which conversational reference had incidentally been made regarding some point which he wished to verify. He haunted all the old book-stalls in London, and knew their contents better than did their owners.
Books are so intimately associated with the very springs of both character and achievement that no adequate idea of the formative influences of the life and poetry of Robert Browning could be gained without familiarity with this most determining and conspicuous influence of his boyhood. The book with which a man has lived becomes an essential factor in his growth. “None of us yet know,” said Ruskin, “for none of us have yet been taught in early youth, what fairy palaces we may build of beautiful thought, proof against all adversity, bright fancies, satisfied memories, noble histories, faithful sayings, treasure-houses of precious and restful thoughts,... houses built without hands for our souls to live in.” These houses for the soul, built in thought, will be transposed into outer form and semblance.
There is a nebulous but none the less pernicious tradition that great literature is formidable, and presents itself as a task rather than as a privilege to the reader. Devotion to the best books has been regarded as something of a test of mental endurance, for which the recompense, if not the antidote, must be sought in periods of indulgence in the frivolous and the sensational. Never was there a more fatal misconception. It is the inconsequential, the crude, the obtuse, that are dull in literature, as in life; and stupidity in various languages might well be entitled to rank among the Seven Deadly Sins of Dante. Even in the greatest literature there is much that the child may easily learn to appreciate and to love.
“Great the Master
And sweet the Magic”
that opens the golden door of literary stimulus. Books are to the mind as is food to the body. Emerson declares that the poet is the only teller of news, and Mrs. Browning pronounced poets as
“The only truth-tellers now left to God.”