'Pauline, a Fragment of a Confession,' Browning's first published poem, was a psychological self-analysis, perfectly characteristic of the time of life at which he wrote it,--very young, full of excesses of mood, of real exultation, and somewhat less real depression--the "confession" of a poet of twenty-one, intensely interested in the ever-new discovery of his own nature, its possibilities, and its relations. It rings very true, and has no decadent touch in it:--
"I am made up of an intensest life
... a principle of restlessness
Which would be all, have, see, know, taste, feel, all--"
this is the note that stays in the reader's mind. But the poem is psychologically rather than poetically noteworthy--except as all beginnings are so; and Browning's statement in a note in his collected poems that he "acknowledged and retained it with extreme repugnance," shows how fully he recognized this.
In 'Paracelsus,' his next long poem, published some two years later, the strength of his later work is first definitely felt. Taking for theme the life of the sixteenth-century physician, astrologer, alchemist, conjuror,--compound of Faust and Cagliostro, mixture of truth-seeker, charlatan, and dreamer,--Browning makes of it the history of the soul of a feverish aspirant after the finality of intellectual power, the knowledge which should be for man the key to the universe; the tragedy of its failure, and the greater tragedy of its discovery of the barrenness of the effort, and the omission from its scheme of life of an element without which power was impotent.
"Yet, constituted thus and thus endowed,
I failed; I gazed on power till I grew blind.
Power--I could not take my eyes from that;
That only I thought should be preserved, increased.
I learned my own deep error: love's undoing
Taught me the worth of love in man's estate,
And what proportion love should hold with power
In his right constitution; love preceding
Power, and with much power always much more love."
'Paracelsus' is the work of a man still far from maturity; but it is Browning's first use of a type of poem in which his powers were to find one of their chief manifestations--a psychological history, told with so slight an aid from "an external machinery of incidents" (to use his own phrase), or from conventional dramatic arrangement, as to constitute a form virtually new.
This was to be notably the method of 'Sordello,' which appeared in 1840. In a note written twenty-three years later to his friend Milsand, and prefixed as a dedication to 'Sordello' in his collected works, he defined the form and its reason most exactly:--"The historical decoration was purposely of no more importance than a background requires, and my stress lay on the incidents in the development of a soul; little else is worth study." This poem, with its "historical decoration" or "background" from the Guelf and Ghibelline struggles in Italy, carries out this design in a fashion that defies description or characterization. With its inexhaustible wealth of psychological suggestion, its interwoven discussion of the most complex problems of life and thought, its metaphysical speculation, it may well give pause to the reader who makes his first approach to Browning through it, and send him back,--if he begins, as is likely, with the feeling of one challenged to an intellectual task,--baffled by the intricacy of its ways and without a comprehension of what it contains or leads to. Mr. Augustine Birrell says of it:--
"We have all heard of the young architect who forgot to put a staircase in his house, which contained fine rooms but no way of getting into them. 'Sordello' is a poem without a staircase. The author, still in his twenties, essayed a high thing. For his subject
'He singled out
Sordello compassed murkily about
With ravage of six long sad hundred years.'
"He partially failed; and the British public, with its accustomed generosity, and in order, I suppose, to encourage the others, has never ceased girding at him because, forty-two years ago, he published at his own charges a little book of two hundred and fifty pages, which even such of them as were then able to read could not understand."
'He singled out
Sordello compassed murkily about
With ravage of six long sad hundred years.'
With 'Sordello,' however, ended for many years--until he may perhaps be said to have taken it up in a greatly disciplined and more powerful form in 'The Ring and the Book' and others--this type and this length of the psychological poem for Browning; and now began that part of his work which is his best gift to English literature.