Browning was singularly
dark in early life, and was often mistaken for an Italian. There does
not, however, seem to be anything particular to be deduced from this,
except that if he looked like an Italian, he must have looked
exceedingly unlike a negro.

There is nothing valid against any of these three theories, just as
there is nothing valid in their favour; they may, any or all of them,
be true, but they are still irrelevant. They are something that is in
history or biography a great deal worse than being false--they are
misleading. We do not want to know about a man like Browning, whether
he had a right to a shield used in the Wars of the Roses, or whether
the tenth grandfather of his Creole grandmother had been white or
black: we want to know something about his family, which is quite a
different thing. We wish to have about Browning not so much the kind
of information which would satisfy Clarencieux King-at-Arms, but the
sort of information which would satisfy us, if we were advertising for
a very confidential secretary, or a very private tutor. We should not
be concerned as to whether the tutor were descended from an Irish
king, but we should still be really concerned about his extraction,
about what manner of people his had been for the last two or three
generations. This is the most practical duty of biography, and this is
also the most difficult. It is a great deal easier to hunt a family
from tombstone to tombstone back to the time of Henry II. than to
catch and realise and put upon paper that most nameless and elusive of
all things--social tone.

It will be said immediately, and must as promptly be admitted, that we
could find a biographical significance in any of these theories if we
looked for it. But it is, indeed, the sin and snare of biographers
that they tend to see significance in everything; characteristic
carelessness if their hero drops his pipe, and characteristic
carefulness if he picks it up again. It is true, assuredly, that all
the three races above named could be connected with Browning's
personality. If we believed, for instance, that he really came of a
race of mediaeval barons, we should say at once that from them he got
his pre-eminent spirit of battle: we should be right, for every line
in his stubborn soul and his erect body did really express the
fighter; he was always contending, whether it was with a German theory
about the Gnostics, or with a stranger who elbowed his wife in a
cr