The finer influence of Shelley upon the genius of Browning in his youth proceeded from something quite other than those doctrinaire abstractions—the formulas of revolution—which Shelley had caught up from Godwin and certain French thinkers of the eighteenth century. Browning's spirit from first to last was one which was constantly reaching upward through the attainments of earth to something that lay beyond them. A climbing spirit, such as his, seemed to perceive in Shelley a spirit that not only climbed but soared. He could in those early days have addressed to Shelley words written later, and suggested, one cannot but believe, by his feeling for his wife:

 
You must be just before, in fine,
See and make me see, for your part,
New depths of the Divine!
 

Shelley opened up for his young and enthusiastic follower new vistas leading towards the infinite, towards the unattainable Best. Browning's only piece of prose criticism—apart from scattered comments in his letters—is the essay introductory to that volume of letters erroneously ascribed to Shelley, which was published when Browning was but little under forty years old. It expresses his mature feelings and convictions; and these doubtless contain within them as their germ the experience of his youth.¹¹ Shelley appears to him as a poet gifted with a fuller perception of nature and man than that of the average mind, and striving to embody the thing he perceives "not so much with reference to the many below, as to the One above him, the supreme Intelligence which apprehends all things in their absolute truth—an ultimate view ever aspired to, if but partially attained, by the poet's own soul." If Shelley was deficient in some subordinate powers which support and reinforce the purely poetic gifts, he possessed the highest faculty and in this he lived and had his being. "His spirit invariably saw and spoke from the last height to which it had attained." What was "his noblest and predominating characteristic" as a poet? Browning attempts to give it definition: it was "his simultaneous perception of Power and Love in the absolute, and of Beauty and Good in the concrete, while he throws, from his poet's station between both, swifter, subtler, and more numerous films for the connexion of each with each, than have been thrown by any modern artificer of whom I have knowledge." In other words it was Shelley's special function to fling an aerial bridge from reality, as we commonly understand that word, to the higher reality which we name the ideal; to set up an aerial ladder—not less solid because it is aerial—upon the earth, whose top reached to heaven. Such was Browning's conception of Shelley, and it pays little regard either to atheistic theory or vegetarian practice.

A time came when Robert Browning must make choice of a future career. His interests in life were manifold, but in some form or another art was the predominant interest. His father remembered his own early inclinations, and how they had been thwarted; he recognised the rare gifts of his son, and he resolved that he should not be immured in the office of a bank. Should he plead at the bar? Should he paint? Should he be a maker of music, as he at one time desired, and for music he always possessed an exceptional talent? When his father spoke to him, Robert Browning knew that his sister was not dependent on any effort of his to provide the means of living. "He appealed," writes Mr Gosse, "to his father, whether it would not be better for him to see life in the best sense, and cultivate the powers of his mind, than to shackle himself in the very outset of his career by a laborious training, foreign to that aim. … So great was the confidence of the father in the genius of his son that the former at once acquiesced in the proposal." It was decided that he should take to what an old woman of the lake district, speaking of "Mr Wudsworth," described as "the poetry business." The believing father was even prepared to invest some capital in the concern. At his expense Paracelsus, Sordello, and Bells and Pomegranates were published.

A poet may make his entrance into literature with small or large inventions, by carving cherry-stones or carving a colossus. Browning, the creator of men and women, the fashioner of minds, would be a sculptor of figures more than life-size rather than an exquisite jeweller; the attempt at a Perseus of this Cellini was to precede his brooches and buttons. He planned, Mr Gosse tells us, "a series of monodramatic epics, narratives of the life of typical souls." In a modification of this vast scheme Paracelsus, which includes more speakers than one, and Sordello, which is not dramatic in form, find their places. They were preceded by Pauline, in the strictest sense a monodrama, a poem not less large in conception than either of the others, though this "fragment of a confession" is wrought out on a more contracted scale.

Pauline, published without the writer's name—his aunt Silverthorne bearing the cost of publication—was issued from the press in January 1833.¹² Browning had not yet completed his twenty-first year. When including it among his poetical works in 1867, he declared that he did so with extreme repugnance and solely with a view to anticipate unauthorised republication of what was no more than a "crude preliminary sketch," entirely lacking in good draughtsmanship and right handling. For the edition of twenty years later, 1888, he revised and corrected Pauline without re-handling it to any considerable extent. In truth Pauline is a poem from which Browning ought not to have desired to detach his mature self. Rarely does a poem by a writer so young deserve better to be read for its own sake. It is an interesting document in the history of its author's mind. It gives promises and pledges which were redeemed in full. It shows what dropped away from the poet and what, being an essential part of his equipment, was retained. It exhibits his artistic method in the process of formation. It sets forth certain leading thoughts which are dominant in his later work. The first considerable production of a great writer must always claim attention from the student of his mind and art.

The poem is a study in what Browning in his Fifine terms "mental analysis"; it attempts to shadow forth, through the fluctuating moods of the dying man, a series of spiritual states. The psychology is sometimes crude; subtle, but clumsily subtle; it is, however, essentially the writer's own. To construe clearly the states of mind which are adumbrated rather than depicted is difficult, for Browning had not yet learnt to manifest his generalised conceptions through concrete details, to plunge his abstractions in reality. The speaker in the poem tells us that he "rudely shaped his life to his immediate wants"; this is intelligible, yet only vaguely intelligible, for we do not know what were these wants, and we do not see any rude shaping of his life. We are told of "deeds for which remorse were vain"; what were these deeds? did he, like Bunyan, play cat on Sunday, or join the ringers of the church bells? "Instance, instance," we cry impatiently. And so the story remains half a shadow. The poem is dramatic, yet, like so much of Browning's work, it is not pure drama coming from profound sympathy with a spirit other than the writer's own; it is only hybrid drama, in which the dramatis persona thinks and moves and acts under the necessity of expounding certain ideas of the poet. Browning's puppets are indeed too often in his earlier poems moved by intellectual wires; the hands are the hands of Luria or Djabal, but the voice is the showman's voice. A certain intemperance in the pursuit of poetic beauty, strange and lovely imagery which obscures rather than interprets, may be regarded as in Pauline the fault or the glory of youth; a young heir arrived at his inheritance will scatter gold pieces. The verse has caught something of its affluent flow, its wavelike career, wave advancing upon wave, from Shelley:

 
'Tis he, I ken the manner of his gait;
He rises on the toe; that spirit of his
In aspiration lifts him from the earth.
 

The aspiration in Browning's later verse is a complex of many forces; here it is a simple poetic enthusiasm.

By virtue of its central theme Pauline is closely related to the poems which at no great distance followed—Paracelsus and Sordello. Each is a study of the flaws which bring genius to all but ruin, a study of the erroneous conduct of life by men of extraordinary powers. In each poem the chief personage aspires and fails, yet rises—for Browning was not of the temper to accept ultimate failures, and postulated a heaven to warrant his optimistic creed—rises at the close from failure to a spiritual recovery, which may be regarded as attainment, but an attainment, as far as earth and its uses are concerned, marred and piteous; he recovers in the end his true direction, but recovers it only for service in worlds other than ours which he may hereafter traverse. He has been seduced or conquered by alien forces and through some inward flaw; he has been faithless to his highest faculties; he has not fulfilled his seeming destiny; yet before death and the darkness of death arrive, light has come; he perceives the wanderings of the way, and in one supreme hour or in one shining moment he gives indefeasible pledges of the loyalty which he has forfeited. Shelley in Alastor, the influence of which on Browning in writing Pauline is evident, had rebuked the idealist within himself, who would live in lofty abstractions to the loss of human sympathy and human love. Browning in Pauline also recognises this danger, but he indicates others—the risk of the lower faculties of the mind encroaching upon and even displacing the higher, the risk of the spirit of aggrandisement, even in the world of the imagination, obtaining the mastery over the spirit of surrender to that which is higher than self. It is quite right and needful to speak of the "lesson" of Browning's poem, and the lesson of Pauline is designed to inculcate first loyalty to a man's highest power, and secondly a worshipping loyalty and service to that which transcends himself, named by the speaker in Pauline by the old and simple name of God.

Was it the problem of his own life—that concerning the conduct of high, intellectual and spiritual powers—which Browning transferred to his art, creating personages other than himself to be exponents of his theme? We cannot tell; but the problem in varied forms persists from poem to poem. The poet imagined as twenty years of age, who makes his fragment of a confession in Pauline, is more than a poet; he is rather of the Sordello type than of the type represented in Eglamor and Aprile.¹³ Through his imagination he would comprehend and possess all forms of life, of beauty, of joy in nature and in humanity; but he must also feel himself at the centre of these, the lord and master of his own perceptions and creations; and yet, at the same time, this man is made for the worship and service of a power higher than self. How is such a nature as this to attain its true ends? What are its special dangers? If he content himself with the exercise of the subordinate faculties, intellectual dexterity, wit, social charm and mastery, he is lost; if he should place himself at the summit, and cease to worship and to love, he is lost. He cannot alter his own nature; he cannot ever renounce his intense consciousness of self, nor even the claim of self to a certain supremacy as the centre of its own sympathies and imaginings. So much is inevitable, and is right. But if he be true to his calling as poet, he will task his noblest faculty, will live in it, and none the less look upward, in love, in humility, in the spirit of loyal service, in the spirit of glad aspiration, to that Power which leans above him and has set him his earthly task.

Such reduced to a colourless and abstract statement is the theme dealt with in Pauline. The young poet, who, through a fading autumn evening, lies upon his death-bed, has been faithless to his high calling, and yet never wholly faithless. As the pallid light declines, he studies his own soul, he reviews his past, he traces his wanderings from the way, and all has become clear. He has failed for the uses of earth; but he recognises in himself capacities and desires for which no adequate scope could ever have been found in this life; and restored to the spirit of love, of trust, by such love, such trust as he can give Pauline, he cannot deny the witnessing audible within his own heart to a future life which may redeem the balance of his temporal loss. The thought which plays so large a part in Browning's later poetry is already present and potent here.

Two incidents in the history of a soul—studied by the speaker under the wavering lights of his hectic malady and fluctuating moods of passion—are dealt with in a singularly interesting and original way. He describes, with strange and beautiful imagery, the cynical, bitter pleasure—few of us do not know it—which the intellectual faculties sometimes derive from mocking and drawing down to their own level the spiritual powers, the intuitive powers, which are higher than they, higher, yet less capable of justification or verification by the common tests of sense and understanding. The witchcraft of the brain degrades the god in us:

 
And then I was a young witch whose blue eyes,
As she stood naked by the river springs,
Drew down a god: I watched his radiant form
Growing less radiant, and it gladdened me.
 

What he presents with such intensity of imaginative power Browning must have known—even if it were but for moments—by experience. And again, there is impressive truth and originality in the description of the state of the poet's mind which succeeded the wreck of his early faith and early hopes inspired by the voice of Shelley—the revolutionary faith in liberty, equality and human perfectibility. Wordsworth in The Prelude—unpublished when Browning wrote Pauline—which is also the history of a poet's mind, has described his own experience of the loss of all these shining hopes and lofty abstractions, and the temper of mind which he describes is one of moral chaos and spiritual despair. The poet of Pauline turns from political and social abstractions to real life, and the touch of reality awakens him as if from a splendid dream; but his mood is not so sane as that of despair. He falls back, with a certain joy, upon the exercise of his inferior powers; he wakes suddenly and "without heart-wreck ":

 
First went my hopes of perfecting mankind,
Next—faith in them, and then in freedom's self
And virtue's self, then my own motives, ends,
And aims and loves, and human love went last.
I felt this no decay, because new powers
Rose as old feelings left—wit, mockery,
Light-heartedness; for I had oft been sad,
Mistrusting my resolves, but now I cast
Hope joyously away; I laughed and said
"No more of this!"
 

It is difficult to believe that Browning is wholly dramatic here; we seem to discover something of that period of Sturm und Drang, when his mood grew restless and aggressive. The homage paid to Shelley, whose higher influence Browning already perceived to be in large measure independent of his creed of revolution, has in it certainly something of the spirit of autobiography. In this enthusiastic admiration for Shelley there is nothing to regret, except the unhappy extravagance of the name "Suntreader," which he invented as a title for the poet of Alastor and Prometheus Unbound.

The attention of Mr W.J. Fox, a Unitarian minister of note, had been directed to Browning's early unpublished verse by Miss Flower. In the Monthly Repository (April 1833) which he then edited, Mr Fox wrote of Pauline with admiration, and Browning was duly grateful for this earliest public recognition of his genius as a poet. In the Athenaeum Allen Cunningham made an effort to be appreciative and sympathetic. John Stuart Mill desired to be the reviewer of Pauline in Taifs Magazine; there, however, the poem had been already dismissed with one contemptuous phrase. It found few readers, but the admiration of one of these, who discovered Pauline many years later, was a sufficient compensation for the general indifference or neglect. "When Mr Browning was living in Florence, he received a letter from a young painter whose name was quite unknown to him, asking him whether he were the author of a poem called Pauline, which was somewhat in his manner, and which the writer had so greatly admired that he had transcribed the whole of it in the British Museum reading-room. The letter was signed D.G. Rossetti, and thus began Mr Browning's acquaintance with this eminent man."¹⁴