The appreciation of Browning’s genius became general in his later years, and zeal was perhaps a little heightened by the complacency of disciples able to penetrate a supposed mist of obscurity. The Browning Society, founded in 1881 by Dr F. J. Furnivall and Miss E. H. Hickey, was a product of this appreciation, and helped to extend the study of the poems. Browning accepted the homage in a simple and friendly way, though he avoided any action which would make him responsible for the publications. He received various honours: LL.D. degree from Cambridge in 1879, the D.C.L. from Oxford in 1882, and LL.D. from Edinburgh in 1884. He became foreign correspondent to the Royal Academy in 1886. His son, who had settled at Venice, married in 1887, and Browning moved to De Vere Gardens. In the autumn of 1889 he went with his sister to visit his son, and stayed on the way at Asolo, which he had first seen in 1838, when it supplied the scenery of Pippa Passes. He was charmed with the place, and proposed to buy a piece of ground and to build upon it a house to be called “Pippa’s Tower”—in memory of his early heroine. While his proposal was under consideration he went to his son at Venice. His health had been breaking for some time, and a cold, aggravated by weakness of the heart, brought on a fatal attack. He died on the 12th of December 1889. He was buried in Westminster Abbey on 31st December. It was suggested that his wife’s body should be removed from Florence to be placed beside him; but their son rightly decided that her grave should not be disturbed.
Browning’s personal characteristics are so strongly stamped upon all his works that it is difficult to assign his place in contemporary thought. He is unique and outside of all schools. His style is so peculiar that he is the easiest of all poets to parody and the most dangerous to imitate. In spite of his early Shelley worship he is in certain respects more closely related to Wordsworth. Both of them started by accepting the poet’s mission as quasi-prophetical or ethical. In other respects they are diametrically contrasted. Wordsworth expounded his philosophy by writing a poetical autobiography. Browning adheres to the dramatic method of which Wordsworth was utterly incapable. He often protested against the supposition that he put himself into his books. Yet there is no writer whose books seem to readers to be clearer revelations of himself. Nothing, in fact, is more characteristic of a man than his judgments of other men, and Browning’s are keen and unequivocal. The revolutionary impulse had died out, and Browning has little to say either of the political questions which had moved Shelley and Byron, or of the social problems which have lately become more prominent. He represents the thought of a quieter epoch. He was little interested, too, in the historical or “romantic” aspect of life. He takes his subjects from a great variety of scenes and places—from ancient Greece, medieval Italy and modern France and England; but the interest for him is not in the picturesque surroundings, but in the human being who is to be found in all periods. Like Balzac, whom he always greatly admired, he is interested in the eternal tragedy and comedy of life. His problem is always to show what are the really noble elements which are eternally valuable in spite of failure to achieve tangible results. He gives, so far, another version of Wordsworth’s doctrine of the cultivation of the “moral being.” The psychological acuteness and the subtle analysis of character are, indeed, peculiar to himself. Like Carlyle, with whom he had certain points of affinity, he protests, though rather by implication than direct denunciation, against the utilitarian or materialistic view of life, and finds the divine element in the instincts which guide and animate every noble character. When he is really inspired by sympathy for such emotions he can make his most grotesque fancies and his most far-fetched analyses subservient to poetry of the highest order. It can hardly be denied that his intellectual ingenuity often tempts him to deviate from his true function, and that his observations are not to be excused because they result from an excess, instead of a deficiency, of intellectual acuteness. But the variety of his interests—aesthetic, philosophical and ethical—is astonishing, and his successes are poems which stand out as unique and unsurpassable in the literature of his time.
The Life and Letters of Browning, by Mrs Sutherland Orr (1891), one of his most intimate friends in later years, and The Love Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, 1845–1846, published by his son in 1899, are the main authorities. A collection of Browning’s poems in 2 vols. appeared in 1849, another in 3 vols. in 1863, another in 6 vols. in 1868, and a revised edition in 16 vols. in 1888–1889; in 1896 Mr Augustine Birrell and Mr F. G. Kenyon edited a complete edition in 2 vols.; another two-volume edition was issued by Messrs Smith, Elder in 1900. Among commentaries on Browning’s works, Mrs Sutherland Orr’s Handbook to the Works of Browning was approved by the poet himself. See also the Browning Society’s Papers; and Mr T. J. Wise’s Materials for a Bibliography of the Writings of Robert Browning, included in the Literary Anecdotes of the Nineteenth Century (1895), by W. Robertson Nicoll and T. J. Wise; Mr. Edmund Gosse’s Robert Browning: Personalia (1890), from notes supplied by Browning himself. Among biographical and critical authorities may be mentioned: J. T. Nettleship, Essays (1868); Arthur Symons, An Introduction to the Study of Browning (1886); Stopford Brooke, The Poetry of Robert Browning (1902); G. K. Chesterton, Browning (1908) in the “English Men of Letters” series. (L. S.)
BROWN-SÉQUARD, CHARLES EDWARD (1817–1894), British physiologist and neurologist, was born at Port Louis, Mauritius, on the 8th of April 1817. His father was an American and his mother a Frenchwoman, but he himself always desired to be looked upon as a British subject, though in the restlessness of his life and the enthusiasm of his disposition, characteristics of his mother’s nation were plainly visible. After graduating in medicine at Paris in 1846 he returned to Mauritius with the intention of practising there, but in 1852 he went to America. Subsequently he returned to Paris, and in 1859 he migrated to London, becoming physician to the national hospital for the paralysed and epileptic. There he stayed for about five years, expounding his views on the pathology of the nervous system in numerous lectures which attracted considerable attention. In 1864 he again crossed the Atlantic, and was appointed professor of physiology and neuro-pathology at Harvard. This position he relinquished in 1867, and in 1869 became professor at the École de Médecine in Paris, but in 1873 he again returned to America and began to practise in New York. Finally, he went back to Paris to succeed Claude Bernard in 1878 as professor of experimental medicine in the Collège de France, and he remained there till his death, which occurred on the 2nd of April 1894 at Sceaux. Brown-Séquard was a keen observer and experimentalist. He contributed largely to our knowledge of the blood and animal heat, as well as many facts of the highest importance on the nervous system. He was the first scientist to work out the physiology of the spinal cord, demonstrating that the decussation of the sensory fibres is in the cord itself. He also did valuable work on the internal secretion of organs, the results of which have been applied with the most satisfactory results in the treatment of myxoedema. Unfortunately in his extreme old age, he advocated the hypodermic injection of a fluid prepared from the testicles of sheep, as a means of prolonging human life. It was known, among scientists, derisively, as the Brown-Séquard Elixir. His researches, published in about 500 essays and papers, especially in the Archives de Physiologie, which he helped to found in 1868, cover a very wide range of physiological and pathological subjects.
BROWNSON, ORESTES AUGUSTUS (1803–1876), American theological, philosophical and sociological writer, was born in Stockbridge, Vermont, on the 16th of September 1803. Having spent some time in active religious, reformatory and political (Democratic) work in the interior of New York state, and at Walpole, New Hampshire, and Canton, Massachusetts, Brownson removed in 1839 to Chelsea, Mass. He at once began to take an independent part in the movements then agitating New England, which between 1830 and 1850 was stirred by discussions pertaining to Unitarianism, transcendentalism, spiritualism, abolitionism and various schemes for communistic living. He was one of the founders, in New York, of the short-lived Workingman’s party in 1828, and established the Boston Quarterly Review, mainly written by himself, in 1838. This periodical was merged in the U.S. Democratic Review of New York in 1842.
