BROWNING
It will be convenient for our purpose to adhere as closely as possible to the order of Chesterton's book. It is a hard task to do justice to Browning even in a long book; the task is not simplified when, in a chapter, it is hoped to give a criticism of an intricate criticism of Browning.
There are two ways to approach such a task: The first is to take the book as a whole and write a review of it, which is a method liable to a superficiality; the second is to take such a work chapter by chapter, and to piece the various criticisms into an ordered whole. This I have attempted to do. I make no attempt to criticize the method of Chesterton's approach to Browning, or his combination of the effect of his life on his work; rather I wish to take what the critic says and comment on his remarks.
There is undoubtedly a fundamental difference between Browning and Dickens which is at once clear to any critic of these two writers. Dickens was, as I have said in an earlier chapter, born at the psychological moment. Browning happened to be born early in the nineteenth century. I cannot see that it would have mattered had he been born at the beginning of the twentieth. His early life, unlike Dickens, was normal, but it did not affect Browning adversely. Had [Dickens'] life been uneventful, I think it not improbable that his literary output would have been commonplace instead of, as nearly as possible, divine.
There is no particular account of Browning's family, which was probably a typical middle-class family, which is to say that they were, like many thousands of their kind, lovers of the normal—a very good reason why later Browning should have acquired a love for the grotesque, which many people quite wrongly define as the abnormal.
The grotesque is a queer psychological state of mind; the abnormal is an extreme kind of individualism that is probably insane, provided the opposite is sane.
What is important, as Chesterton feels, is that we shall get some account of Browning's home. It is in the home that we can usually detect the embryo of future activity. The germ, although sometimes hidden, is nevertheless there, which is exactly why the commonplace home life of a genius, before the public has discovered the fact, is interesting.
To quote our critic: 'Browning was a thoroughly typical Englishman of the middle class,' and he remained so through his life.
But this middle-class Englishman walking through the streets of Camberwell, as the boys played in the gutters, was Browning, not then the master poet of the Victorian Era, but the young man who could 'pass a bookstall and find no thrill in beholding on a placard the name of Shelley.'
Browning found his early life in an age 'of inspired office boys,' an age that emerged from the shadow of the French Revolution, that extreme method of optimism which Chesterton believes no Englishman can understand, not even Carlyle himself. It was an optimism that was so, because it held that man was worthy of liberty, which is to say that no man is by his nature ever meant to be a slave.