I remember in my boyhood
(when Browning kept us awake like coffee) a friend reading out the poem
about the portrait to which I have already referred, reading it in that
rapid dramatic way in which this poet must be read. And I was profoundly
puzzled at the passage where it seemed to say that the cousin
disparaged the picture, "while John scorns ale." I could not think what
this sudden teetotalism on the part of John had to do with the affair,
but I forgot to ask at the time and it was only years afterwards that,
looking at the book, I found it was "John's corns ail," a very
Browningesque way of saying he winced. Most of Browning's obscurity is
of that sort--the mistakes are almost as quaint as misprints--and the
Browning student, in that sense, is more a proof reader than a disciple.
For the rest his real religion was of the most manly, even the most
boyish sort. He is called an optimist; but the word suggests a
calculated contentment which was not in the least one of his vices. What
he really was was a romantic. He offered the cosmos as an adventure
rather than a scheme. He did not explain evil, far less explain it away;
he enjoyed defying it.
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