"Robert Browning" by C. H. Herford. Published by Good Press. Good Press publishes a wide range of titles that encompasses every genre. From well-known classics & literary fiction and non-fiction to forgotten−or yet undiscovered gems−of world literature, we issue the books that need to be read. Each Good Press edition has been meticulously edited and formatted to boost readability for all e-readers and devices. Our goal is to produce eBooks that are user-friendly and accessible to everyone in a high-quality digital format.
Оглавление
C. H. Herford. Robert Browning
Robert Browning
Table of Contents
PART I
BROWNING'S LIFE AND WORK
BROWNING
CHAPTER I
EARLY LIFE. PARACELSUS
CHAPTER II
ENLARGING HORIZONS. SORDELLO
CHAPTER III
MATURING METHODS. DRAMAS AND DRAMATIC LYRICS
I
II
III
CHAPTER IV
WEDDED LIFE IN ITALY. MEN AND WOMEN
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
CHAPTER V
LONDON. DRAMATIS PERSONÆ
CHAPTER VI
THE RING AND THE BOOK
CHAPTER VII
AFTERMATH
CHAPTER VIII
THE LAST DECADE
PART II
BROWNING'S MIND AND ART
CHAPTER IX
THE POET
I
II
III
IV
1. JOY IN LIGHT AND COLOUR
V
2. JOY IN FORM
VI
3. JOY IN POWER
VII
4. JOY IN SOUL
VIII
CHAPTER X
THE INTERPRETER OF LIFE
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
INDEX
PERIODS OF EUROPEAN LITERATURE
A COMPLETE AND CONTINUOUS HISTORY OF THE SUBJECT
PHILOSOPHICAL CLASSICS
FOR ENGLISH READERS
FOREIGN CLASSICS
FOR ENGLISH READERS
ANCIENT CLASSICS
FOR ENGLISH READERS
Отрывок из книги
C. H. Herford
Published by Good Press, 2019
.....
Paracelsus, though only a series of quasi-dramatic scenes, suggested considerable undeveloped capacity for drama. From a career in which the most sensational event was a dismissal from a professorship, and the absorbing passion the thirst for knowledge, he had elicited a tragedy of the scientific intellect. But it was equally obvious that the writer's talent was not purely dramatic; and that his most splendid and original endowments required some other medium than drama for their full unfolding. The author of Paracelsus was primarily concerned with character, and with action as the mirror of character; agreeing in both points substantially with the author of Hamlet. But while Browning's energetic temperament habitually impelled him to represent character in action, his imaginative strength did not lie in the region of action at all, but in the region of thought; the kinds of expression of which he had boundless command were rather those which analyse character than those which exhibit it. The two impulses derived from temperament and from imagination thus drew him in somewhat diverse directions; and for some years the joy in the stir and stress and many-sided life of drama competed with the powerful bent of the portrayer of souls, until the two contending currents finally coalesced in the dramatic monologues of Men and Women. In 1835 the solution was not yet found, but the five years which followed were to carry Browning, not without crises of perplexity and hesitation, far on his way towards it. Paracelsus was no sooner completed than he entered upon his kindred but more esoteric portrayal of the soul-history of Sordello—a study in which, with the dramatic form, almost all the dramatic excellences of its predecessors are put aside. But the poet was outgrowing the method; the work hung fire; and we find him, before he had gone far with the perplexed record of that "ineffectual angel," already "eager to freshen a jaded mind by diverting it to the healthy natures of a grand epoch."[6]
[6] Preface to the first edition of Strafford (subsequently omitted).
