Synopses & Reviews
Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: in POLITICAL TENDENCIES IN THE political affairs of his own age and country Browning as a poet shows little interest. This may at first seem strange, for that he was deeply sympathetic with past historical movements indicating a growth toward democratic ideals in government is abundantly proved by his choice and treatment of historical epochs in which the democratic tendencies were peculiarly evident. Why then did he not give us dramatic pictures of the Victorian era, in which as perhaps in no other era of English history the yeast of political freedom has been steadily and quietly working? There were probably several reasons for his failure to make himself felt as an influence in the political world of his time. In the first place, he was preeminently a dramatic poet, and as such his interest was in the presentation and analysis of individual character as it might work itself out in a given historical environment. To deal with contemporaries in this analytic manner would be a difficult and delicate matter, and, as we see, in those instances where he did venture upon an analysis of English contemporaries, as in the case of Wiseman (Bishop Blougram), Carlyle in Bernard de Mandeville and in George Bubb Dodington, the sketch of Lord Beaconsfield, he takes care to suppress every external circumstance which would lead to their identification, and to dwell only upon their intellectual or psychic aspects. A second reason is that the present is usually too near at hand to be used altogether effectively as dramatic material. Contemporary conditions of history seem to have an air of stateliness owing to the fact that every one is familiar with them, not only through talk and experience but through newspapers and magazines, while their larger, universal meanings cannot be seen ...
Synopsis
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