to an external machinery of incidents to create and evolve the
crisis I desire to produce, I have ventured to display somewhat minutely
the mood itself in its rise and progress, and have suffered the agency
by which it is influenced and determined, to be generally discernible
in its effects alone, and subordinate throughout, if not altogether
excluded: and this for a reason. I have endeavoured to write a poem, not
a drama: the canons of the drama are well known, and I cannot but think
that, inasmuch as they have immediate regard to stage representation,
the peculiar advantages they hold out are really such only so long as
the purpose for which they were at first instituted is kept in view. I
do not very well understand what is called a Dramatic Poem, wherein all
those restrictions only submitted to on account of compensating good
in the original scheme are scrupulously retained, as though for some
special fitness in themselves--and all new facilities placed at an
author's disposal by the vehicle he selects, as pertinaciously rejected.
. . .'

Mr. Fox reviewed this also in the 'Monthly Repository'. The article
might be obtained through the kindness of Mrs. Bridell-Fox; but it will
be sufficient for my purpose to refer to its closing paragraph, as given
by her in the 'Argosy' of February 1890. It was a final expression of
what the writer regarded as the fitting intellectual attitude towards a
rising poet, whose aims and methods lay so far beyond the range of
the conventional rules of poetry. The great event in the history of
'Paracelsus' was John Forster's article on it in the 'Examiner'. Mr.
Forster had recently come to town. He could barely have heard Mr.
Browning's name, and, as he afterwards told him, was perplexed in
reading the poem by the question of whether its author was an old or a
young man; but he knew that a writer in the 'Athenaeum' had called it
rubbish, and he had taken it up as a probable subject for a piece of
slashing criticism. What he did write can scarcely be defined as praise.
It was the simple, ungrudging admission of the unequivocal power, as
well as brilliant promise, which he recognized in the work. This
mutual experience was the introduction to a long and, certainly on Mr.
Browning's part, a sincere friendship.

Chapter 6

1835-1838

Removal to Hatcham; some Particulars--Renewed Intercourse with the
second Family of Robert Browning's Grandfather--Reuben Browning--William
Shergold