BROWNING, ROBERT. - English poet, b. at Camberwell on 17 May 1812, d. at Venice on 12 December 1889. A many-sided and emotional spirit, he tempered the happiness of life with the torment of art, in a quest for expression that anticipated the times. A nomad of culture, he explored, to sing them, obscure regions of history, just as he loved to practice unexpected dissections of consciences and to traverse the world physically, from St. Petersburg to Italy, «his only university» and often a source of inspiration (he dwelt long in Florence with his wife Elizabeth Barrett and was among the first to discover the enchantment of Venice). His inner restlessness also nourished the technical daring of his poetics, with which he sought to react against the literary environment and which sometimes degenerated into a lavish apparatus of images, rhymes, and perfections that disorient the reader.
As his thought remained substantially bourgeois, even if idealistically cross-grained in Carlylean moulds, so his cosmic and human vision was refracted into a picturesque of Mediterranean intensity. Living in an age when science was beginning its assaults on faith, B., who had inherited from his mother a deeply religious disposition and a firm moral structure, felt the need for a spiritual ascent that, begun on earth above every positivistic barrier, might extend into the hereafter, even to God, and he regarded earthly life as training for good, a vestibule of eternity, a trial in which even sin and error are means of spiritual refinement. Even art and love derive their reflections from such a conception: the former understood as the sublimation of narrow worldly reality into lights of superior truth, with constant projection of the real upon the ideal; the latter raised to the symbol of universal love and thus sung with almost constant removal of sensual residues. Such an inner attitude of B. cannot but be illumined by Christian lights: a Christianity, however, more sentimental than dogmatic; an aspiration, rather than an arrival.
Moreover, the religious problematic is, more or less, present throughout B.’s work, which, after a philosophical phase (Pauline, 1833; Paracelsus, 1835; Sordello, 1840) and a dramatic one (Strafford, 1837; Pippa Passes, 1841; etc.), culminates in the affirmations of maturity (Dramatic Lyrics, 1842; Dramatic Romances and Lyrics, 1843; Christmas Eve and Easter Day, 1850; Men and Women, 1855; Dramatis Personae, 1864; The Ring and The Book, 1868–69), only to lapse thereafter into the analysis, not devoid of mannerism and weakened in style, of his later productions.
A scrutineer of solitary souls, B. was less successful in the theatre, though he did assert himself as a master of dramatic monologues. A splendid proof of this is his masterpiece, the aforementioned The Ring and The Book, in which the chronicle of the murder of a young woman (Pompilia) and her lover (Caponsacchi) at the hands of her husband Guido, in papal Rome of the 17th century, is reflected in the psychological mirror of the various actors and witnesses to the event. Despite its unevenness, the long poem remains one of the loftiest voices of 19th-century European poetry.