With all the controversy it has caused, 'Sordello' has had no great influence on Browningites; its name has passed into almost contempt. Chesterton has done much to give the true meaning of this strange work. With his next poem Browning spoke with a voice that, as our critic says, proved that he had found that he was not Robinson Crusoe, which is to say that he had found that the world contained a great number of people. Despite the 1,500 millions amongst whom we 'live and move and have our being' we are apt to think that we alone are important, which is not conceit but a mere proposition demonstrating that man is a universe in himself while being but an infinitesimal part of the universe.
'Pippa Passes' is a poem which expresses a love of humanity; it is an epic of unconscious influence which, no doubt, Browning felt was the key to all that is best and noble in human activity. 'The whole idea of the poem lies in the fact that "Pippa Passes" is utterly remote from the grand folk whose lives she troubles and transforms.'
Browning's poetry in the poetical sense was now nearing its zenith. The 'Dramatic Lyrics' were published in 1842, possibly about the time that Dickens was returning from his triumphant American tour. These showed, Chesterton thinks, the two qualities most often denied to Browning, passion and beauty. They are the contradiction to critics, other than ours, who regard Browning as wholly a philosophic poet, which is to say a poet who wrote poetry not for its own sake but for purely utilitarian purpose; not that poetry of the emotions is not useful—it is on a different plane.
The poems were those that 'represent the arrival of the real Browning of literary history'; for in these he discovered what was, for Chesterton, Browning's finest achievement, his dramatic lyrical poems.
Critics have said that Browning's poetry lacks passion and the most poignant emotion of human nature, love. Chesterton, on the other hand, considers that Browning was the finest love poet of the world. It is real love poetry, because it talks about real people, not ideals; it does not muse of the Prince Charming meeting the Fairy Princess, and forget the devoted wife meeting her husband on the villa doorstep with open arms and a nice dinner in the parlour. Sentiment must be based on reality if it is to have worth. This is the strong point, for our critic, of Browning's love poetry.
The next work of importance that came from Browning's pen was the 'Return of the Druses,' which shows Browning's interest in the strange religions of the East, that queer phantastic part of the world that gave birth to a Western religion which has transformed the West, leaving the East to gaze afar off. This poem is, for Chesterton, a psychological one. It is an attempt to give an account of a human being; perhaps the most difficult task in the world, because it can never hope to solve all sides of the question. The central character of this splendid poem is one 'Djubal,' a queer mixture of the virtues of the Deity with the vices of Humanity. He is for Browning the first of a series of characters on which he displays his wonderful powers of apologizing for apparently bad men.
He attempted, to quote our critic, 'to seek out the sinners whom even sinners cast out,' which Christ always did, and which His Church does not always do.
Again Browning turned his hand to writing plays, but he was always a 'neglected dramatist' in the sense that he had to push his plays; his plays did not push him.
His next play, 'A Blot on the "Scutcheon,"' is chiefly interesting, as it was the occasion of a quarrel between its author and that most eccentric of theatrical personalities, Macready. The quarrel was, our critic points out, a matter of money. But Browning failed to see this; he was a man of the world in his poems, but not in his life.
It is interesting here to see what our critic says of Browning about this period before we consider the question of his marriage. 'There were people who called Browning a snob. He was fond of wealth and fond of society; he admired them as the child who comes in from the desert. He bore the same relation to the snob that the righteous man bears to the Pharisee—something frightfully close and similar and yet an everlasting opposite.'