Browning and His CenturyClarke, Helen A. (Helen Archibald)
Philosophy
Browning and His Century
Clarke, Helen A. (Helen Archibald)
Browning, Robert, 1812-1889; Nineteenth century; Poets, English -- 19th century -- Biography
This is only one of many instances which go to show that Browning's
conception of love might include, on the one hand, a complete freedom
from the trammels imposed upon it by conventional codes of morality, but
on the other, was so real and permanent a sympathy between two souls, and
so absolute a revelation of divine beauty, that its morality far
transcended that of the conventional codes, which under the guise of
lawful alliances permit and even encourage marriages based upon the most
external of attractions, or those entered into for merely social or
commercial reasons. A sin against love seems in Browning's eyes to come
the nearest of all human failings to the unpardonable sin.
It must not be supposed from what has been said that he had any
anarchistic desire to do away with the solemnization of marriage, but his
eyes were wide open to the fact that there might be sin within the
marriage bond, and just as surely that there might be love pure and true
outside of it.
Another illustration of Browning's belief in the existence of a love such
as Shakespeare describes, which looks on tempests and is never shaken, is
given in the "Inn Album." Here, again, the characters are all English, and
the story is based upon an actual occurrence. Such changes as Browning
has made in the story are with the intention of pitting against the
villainy of an aristocratic seducer of the lowest type a bourgeois young
man, who has been in love with the betrayed woman, and who when he finds
out that it was this man, his friend, who had stood between them, does not
swerve from his loyalty and truth to her, and in the end avenges her by
killing the aristocratic villain. The young man is betrothed to a girl he
cares nothing for, the woman has married a man she cares nothing for. All
is of no moment in the presence of a genuine loyal emotion which shows
itself capable of a life of devotion with no thought of reward.
Browning has nowhere translated into more noble action the love of a man
than in the passage where the hero of the story gives himself unselfishly
to the woman who has been so deeply wronged:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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