CHAPTER 1.
It must, to admirers of Browning\'s writings, appear singularly
appropriate that so cosmopolitan a poet was born in London. It would
seem as though something of that mighty complex life, so confusedly
petty to the narrow vision, so grandiose and even majestic to the larger ken,
had blent with his being from the first. What fitter birthplace for the poet
whom a comrade has called the "Subtlest Assertor of the Soul in Song",
the poet whose writings are indeed a mirror of the age?
A man may be in all things a Londoner and yet be a provincial. The
accident of birthplace does not necessarily involve parochialism of the
soul. It is not the village which produces the Hampden, but the Hampden
who immortalises the village. It is a favourite jest of Rusticus that his
urban brother has the manner of Omniscience and the knowledge of a
parish beadle. Nevertheless, though the strongest blood insurgent in the
metropolitan heart is not that which is native to it, one might well be proud
to have had one\'s atom-pulse atune from the first with the large rhythm of
the national life at its turbulent, congested, but ever ebullient centre.
Certainly Browning was not the man to be ashamed of his being a
Londoner, much less to deny his natal place. He was proud of it: through
good sense, no doubt, but possibly also through some instinctive
apprehension of the fact that the great city was indeed the fit mother of
such a son. "Ashamed of having been born in the greatest city of the
world!" he exclaimed on one occasion; "what an extraordinary thing to say!
It suggests a wavelet in a muddy shallow grimily contorting itself because
it had its birth out in the great ocean."