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