Volume 9, Number 11 · December 21, 1967
That Old Identity Game
By Christopher Ricks
Robert Browning and His World: The Private Face
by Maisie Ward
Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 318 pp., $8.50
The Devil Drives: A Life of Sir Richard Burton
by Fawn M. Brodie
Norton, 390 pp., $6.95
Robert Browning and Sir Richard Burton—have they much in common apart from their initials? Both were poets (one truly a poet). Both were travelers, translators, men of cranky but encyclopaedic learning. Both were fascinated by language and languages, by exotic situations and outré cruelty, by disguises, acting, and hypocrisy (all the actors in ancient Greece were hypocrites). 'Discovery is my mania': the words which are Burton's might have been Browning's. Both were explorers—Burton penetrating the sources of the Nile, Mecca, and Salt Lake City; Browning penetrating other ages and other values, the minds and hearts of the fanatic, the casuist, and the murderer. Both manifested a skepticism laced with fascination toward hypnotism and spiritualism. Both were married to women of extraordinary talent and will power. Both were hunger-bitten. They may have hankered for love, fame, and wisdom, but what they hungered to be given was experience—and both found that the giving famishes the craving. Neither of them was a nobody.
Review, 2153 words
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