LIFE AND LETTERS OF ROBERT BROWNING

by Mrs. Sutherland Orr

Second Edition

Preface

Such letters of Mr. Browning’s as appear, whole or in part, in the present
volume have been in most cases given to me by the persons to whom they
were addressed, or copied by Miss Browning from the originals under her
care; but I owe to the daughter of the Rev. W. J. Fox—Mrs. Bridell
Fox—those written to her father and to Miss Flower; the two
interesting extracts from her father’s correspondence with herself and Mr.
Browning’s note to Mr. Robertson.

For my general material I have been largely indebted to Miss Browning. Her
memory was the only existing record of her brother’s boyhood and youth. It
has been to me an unfailing as well as always accessible authority for
that subsequent period of his life which I could only know in disconnected
facts or his own fragmentary reminiscences. It is less true, indeed, to
say that she has greatly helped me in writing this short biography than
that without her help it could never have been undertaken.

I thank my friends Mrs. R. Courtenay Bell and Miss Hickey for their
invaluable assistance in preparing the book for, and carrying it through
the press; and I acknowledge with real gratitude the advantages derived by
it from Mr. Dykes Campbell’s large literary experience in his very careful
final revision of the proofs.

A. Orr. April 22, 1891.

CONTENTS

LIFE AND LETTERS OF ROBERT BROWNING

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Conclusion

Index

Chapter 1 Origin of the Browning Family—Robert Browning’s

Grandfather—His position and Character—His first and second
Marriage—Unkindness towards his eldest Son, Robert Browning’s Father—Alleged
Infusion of West Indian Blood through Robert Browning’s Grandmother—Existing
Evidence against it—The Grandmother’s Portrait.

Chapter 2 Robert Browning’s Father—His Position in Life—Comparison

between him and his Son—Tenderness towards his Son—Outline of
his Habits and Character—His Death—Significant Newspaper
Paragraph—Letter of Mr. Locker—Lampson—Robert Browning’s
Mother—Her Character and Antecedents—Their Influence upon her
Son—Nervous Delicacy imparted to both her Children—Its special
Evidences in her Son.

Chapter 3 1812-1826 Birth of Robert Browning—His Childhood

and Schooldays—Restless Temperament—Brilliant Mental
Endowments—Incidental Peculiarities—Strong Religious Feeling—Passionate
Attachment to his Mother; Grief at first Separation—Fondness for
Animals—Experiences of School Life—Extensive Reading—Early
Attempts in Verse—Letter from his Father concerning them—Spurious
Poems in Circulation—’Incondita’—Mr. Fox—Miss Flower.

Chapter 4 1826-1833 First Impressions of Keats and Shelley—Prolonged

Influence of Shelley—Details of Home Education—Its Effects—Youthful
Restlessness—Counteracting Love of Home—Early Friendships:
Alfred Domett, Joseph Arnould, the Silverthornes—Choice of Poetry as
a Profession—Alternative Suggestions; mistaken Rumours concerning
them—Interest in Art—Love of good Theatrical Performances—Talent
for Acting—Final Preparation for Literary Life.

Chapter 5 1833-1835 ‘Pauline’—Letters to Mr. Fox—Publication
of the

Poem; chief Biographical and Literary Characteristics—Mr. Fox’s
Review in the ‘Monthly Repository’; other Notices—Russian Journey—Desired
diplomatic Appointment—Minor Poems; first Sonnet; their Mode of
Appearance—’The Trifler’—M. de Ripert-Monclar—’Paracelsus’—Letters
to Mr. Fox concerning it; its Publication—Incidental Origin of
‘Paracelsus’; its inspiring Motive; its Relation to ‘Pauline’—Mr.
Fox’s Review of it in the ‘Monthly Repository’—Article in the
‘Examiner’ by John Forster.

Chapter 6 1835-1838 Removal to Hatcham; some Particulars—Renewed

Intercourse with the second Family of Robert Browning’s Grandfather—Reuben
Browning—William Shergold Browning—Visitors at Hatcham—Thomas
Carlyle—Social Life—New Friends and Acquaintance—Introduction
to Macready—New Year’s Eve at Elm Place—Introduction to John
Forster—Miss Fanny Haworth—Miss Martineau—Serjeant
Talfourd—The ‘Ion’ Supper—’Strafford’—Relations with
Macready—Performance of ‘Strafford’—Letters concerning it from
Mr. Browning and Miss Flower—Personal Glimpses of Robert Browning—Rival
Forms of Dramatic Inspiration—Relation of ‘Strafford’ to ‘Sordello’—Mr.
Robertson and the ‘Westminster Review’.

Chapter 7 1838-1841 First Italian Journey—Letters to Miss Haworth—Mr.

John Kenyon—’Sordello’—Letter to Miss Flower—’Pippa
Passes’—’Bells and Pomegranates’.

Chapter 8 1841-1844 ‘A Blot in the ‘Scutcheon’—Letters to Mr.

Frank Hill; Lady Martin—Charles Dickens—Other Dramas and Minor
Poems—Letters to Miss Lee; Miss Haworth; Miss Flower—Second
Italian Journey; Naples—E. J. Trelawney—Stendhal.

Chapter 9 1844-1849 Introduction to Miss Barrett—Engagement—Motives

for Secrecy—Marriage—Journey to Italy—Extract of Letter
from Mr. Fox—Mrs. Browning’s Letters to Miss Mitford—Life at
Pisa—Vallombrosa—Florence; Mr. Powers; Miss Boyle—Proposed
British Mission to the Vatican—Father Prout—Palazzo Guidi—Fano;
Ancona—’A Blot in the ‘Scutcheon’ at Sadler’s Wells.

Chapter 10 1849-1852 Death of Mr. Browning’s Mother—Birth of his

Son—Mrs. Browning’s Letters continued—Baths of Lucca—Florence
again—Venice—Margaret Fuller Ossoli—Visit to England—Winter
in Paris—Carlyle—George Sand—Alfred de Musset.

Chapter 11 1852-1855 M. Joseph Milsand—His close Friendship with

Mr. Browning; Mrs. Browning’s Impression of him—New Edition of Mr.
Browning’s Poems—’Christmas Eve and Easter Day’—’Essay’ on
Shelley—Summer in London—Dante Gabriel Rossetti—Florence;
secluded Life—Letters from Mr. and Mrs. Browning—’Colombe’s
Birthday’—Baths of Lucca—Mrs. Browning’s Letters—Winter
in Rome—Mr. and Mrs. Story—Mrs. Sartoris—Mrs. Fanny
Kemble—Summer in London—Tennyson—Ruskin.

Chapter 12 1855-1858 ‘Men and Women’—’Karshook’—’Two in the

Campagna’—Winter in Paris; Lady Elgin—’Aurora Leigh’—Death
of Mr. Kenyon and Mr. Barrett—Penini—Mrs. Browning’s Letters
to Miss Browning—The Florentine Carnival—Baths of Lucca—Spiritualism—Mr.
Kirkup; Count Ginnasi—Letter from Mr. Browning to Mr. Fox—Havre.

Chapter 13 1858-1861 Mrs. Browning’s Illness—Siena—Letter from
Mr.

Browning to Mr. Leighton—Mrs. Browning’s Letters continued—Walter
Savage Landor—Winter in Rome—Mr. Val Prinsep—Friends in
Rome: Mr. and Mrs. Cartwright—Multiplying Social Relations—Massimo
d’Azeglio—Siena again—Illness and Death of Mrs. Browning’s
Sister—Mr. Browning’s Occupations—Madame du Quaire—Mrs.
Browning’s last Illness and Death.

Chapter 14 1861-1863 Miss Blagden—Letters from Mr. Browning to

Miss Haworth and Mr. Leighton—His Feeling in regard to Funeral
Ceremonies—Establishment in London—Plan of Life—Letter
to Madame du Quaire—Miss Arabel Barrett—Biarritz—Letters
to Miss Blagden—Conception of ‘The Ring and the Book’—Biographical
Indiscretion—New Edition of his Works—Mr. and Mrs. Procter.

Chapter 15 1863-1869 Pornic—’James Lee’s Wife’—Meeting at Mr.
F.

Palgrave’s—Letters to Miss Blagden—His own Estimate of his
Work—His Father’s Illness and Death; Miss Browning—Le Croisic—Academic
Honours; Letter to the Master of Balliol—Death of Miss Barrett—Audierne—Uniform
Edition of his Works—His rising Fame—’Dramatis Personae’—’The
Ring and the Book’; Character of Pompilia.

Chapter 16 1869-1873 Lord Dufferin; Helen’s Tower—Scotland; Visit to

Lady Ashburton—Letters to Miss Blagden—St.-Aubin; The
Franco-Prussian War—’Herve Riel’—Letter to Mr. G. M. Smith—’Balaustion’s
Adventure’; ‘Prince Hohenstiel—Schwangau’—’Fifine at the Fair’—Mistaken
Theories of Mr. Browning’s Work—St.-Aubin; ‘Red Cotton Nightcap
Country’.

Chapter 17 1873-1878 London Life—Love of Music—Miss

Egerton-Smith—Periodical Nervous Exhaustion—Mers;
‘Aristophanes’ Apology’—’Agamemnon’—’The Inn Album’—’Pacchiarotto
and other Poems’—Visits to Oxford and Cambridge—Letters to
Mrs. Fitz-Gerald—St. Andrews; Letter from Professor Knight—In
the Savoyard Mountains—Death of Miss Egerton-Smith—’La
Saisiaz’; ‘The Two Poets of Croisic’—Selections from his Works.

Chapter 18 1878-1884 He revisits Italy; Asolo; Letters to Mrs.

Fitz-Gerald—Venice—Favourite Alpine Retreats—Mrs. Arthur
Bronson—Life in Venice—A Tragedy at Saint-Pierre—Mr.
Cholmondeley—Mr. Browning’s Patriotic Feeling; Extract from Letter
to Mrs. Charles Skirrow—’Dramatic Idyls’—’Jocoseria’—’Ferishtah’s
Fancies’.

Chapter 19 1881-1887 The Browning Society; Mr. Furnivall; Miss E.

H. Hickey—His Attitude towards the Society; Letter to Mrs.
Fitz-Gerald—Mr. Thaxter, Mrs. Celia Thaxter—Letter to Miss
Hickey; ‘Strafford’—Shakspere and Wordsworth Societies—Letters
to Professor Knight—Appreciation in Italy; Professor Nencioni—The
Goldoni Sonnet—Mr. Barrett Browning; Palazzo Manzoni—Letters
to Mrs. Charles Skirrow—Mrs. Bloomfield Moore—Llangollen; Sir
Theodore and Lady Martin—Loss of old Friends—Foreign
Correspondent of the Royal Academy—’Parleyings with certain People
of Importance in their Day’.

Chapter 20 Constancy to Habit—Optimism—Belief in Providence—Political

Opinions—His Friendships—Reverence for Genius—Attitude
towards his Public—Attitude towards his Work—Habits of Work—His
Reading—Conversational Powers—Impulsiveness and Reserve—Nervous
Peculiarities—His Benevolence—His Attitude towards Women.

Chapter 21 1887-1889 Marriage of Mr. Barrett Browning—Removal to De

Vere Gardens—Symptoms of failing Strength—New Poems; New
Edition of his Works—Letters to Mr. George Bainton, Mr. Smith, and
Lady Martin—Primiero and Venice—Letters to Miss Keep—The
last Year in London—Asolo—Letters to Mrs. Fitz-Gerald, Mrs.
Skirrow, and Mr. G. M. Smith.

Chapter 22 1889 Proposed Purchase of Land at Asolo—Venice—Letter

to Mr. G. Moulton-Barrett—Lines in the ‘Athenaeum’—Letter to
Miss Keep—Illness—Death—Funeral Ceremonial at Venice—Publication
of ‘Asolando’—Interment in Poets’ Corner.

LIFE AND LETTERS OF ROBERT BROWNING

Chapter 1

Origin of the Browning Family—Robert Browning’s Grandfather—His
position and Character—His first and second Marriage—Unkindness
towards his eldest Son, Robert Browning’s Father—Alleged Infusion of
West Indian Blood through Robert Browning’s Grandmother—Existing
Evidence against it—The Grandmother’s Portrait.

A belief was current in Mr. Browning’s lifetime that he had Jewish blood
in his veins. It received outward support from certain accidents of his
life, from his known interest in the Hebrew language and literature, from
his friendship for various members of the Jewish community in London. It
might well have yielded to the fact of his never claiming the kinship,
which could not have existed without his knowledge, and which, if he had
known it, he would, by reason of these very sympathies, have been the last
person to disavow. The results of more recent and more systematic inquiry
have shown the belief to be unfounded.

Our poet sprang, on the father’s side, from an obscure or, as family
tradition asserts, a decayed branch, of an Anglo-Saxon stock settled, at
an early period of our history, in the south, and probably also
south-west, of England. A line of Brownings owned the manors of
Melbury-Sampford and Melbury-Osmond, in north-west Dorsetshire; their last
representative disappeared—or was believed to do so—in the
time of Henry VII., their manors passing into the hands of the Earls of
Ilchester, who still hold them.* The name occurs after 1542 in different
parts of the country: in two cases with the affix of ‘esquire’, in two
also, though not in both coincidently, within twenty miles of Pentridge,
where the first distinct traces of the poet’s family appear. Its cradle,
as he called it, was Woodyates, in the parish of Pentridge, on the
Wiltshire confines of Dorsetshire; and there his ancestors, of the third
and fourth generations, held, as we understand, a modest but independent
social position.

This fragment of history, if we may so call it, accords better with our
impression of Mr. Browning’s genius than could any pedigree which more
palpably connected him with the ‘knightly’ and ‘squirely’ families whose
name he bore. It supplies the strong roots of English national life to
which we instinctively refer it. Both the vivid originality of that genius
and its healthy assimilative power stamp it as, in some sense, the product
of virgin soil; and although the varied elements which entered into its
growth were racial as well as cultural, and inherited as well as absorbed,
the evidence of its strong natural or physical basis remains undisturbed.

Mr. Browning, for his own part, maintained a neutral attitude in the
matter. He neither claimed nor disclaimed the more remote genealogical
past which had presented itself as a certainty to some older members of
his family. He preserved the old framed coat-of-arms handed down to him
from his grandfather; and used, without misgiving as to his right to do
so, a signet-ring engraved from it, the gift of a favourite uncle, in
years gone by. But, so long as he was young, he had no reason to think
about his ancestors; and, when he was old, he had no reason to care about
them; he knew himself to be, in every possible case, the most important
fact in his family history.

he wrote, a few years back, to a friend who had incidentally questioned
him about it.

Our immediate knowledge of the family begins with Mr. Browning’s
grandfather, also a Robert Browning, who obtained through Lord
Shaftesbury’s influence a clerkship in the Bank of England, and entered on
it when barely twenty, in 1769. He served fifty years, and rose to the
position of Principal of the Bank Stock Office, then an important one, and
which brought him into contact with the leading financiers of the day. He
became also a lieutenant in the Honourable Artillery Company, and took
part in the defence of the Bank in the Gordon Riots of 1789. He was an
able, energetic, and worldly man: an Englishman, very much of the
provincial type; his literary tastes being limited to the Bible and ‘Tom
Jones’, both of which he is said to have read through once a year. He
possessed a handsome person and, probably, a vigorous constitution, since
he lived to the age of eighty-four, though frequently tormented by gout; a
circumstance which may help to account for his not having seen much of his
grandchildren, the poet and his sister; we are indeed told that he
particularly dreaded the lively boy’s vicinity to his afflicted foot. He
married, in 1778, Margaret, daughter of a Mr. Tittle by his marriage with
Miss Seymour; and who was born in the West Indies and had inherited
property there. They had three children: Robert, the poet’s father; a
daughter, who lived an uneventful life and plays no part in the family
history; and another son who died an infant. The Creole mother died also
when her eldest boy was only seven years old, and passed out of his memory
in all but an indistinct impression of having seen her lying in her
coffin. Five years later the widower married a Miss Smith, who gave him a
large family.

This second marriage of Mr. Browning’s was a critical event in the life of
his eldest son; it gave him, to all appearance, two step-parents instead
of one. There could have been little sympathy between his father and
himself, for no two persons were ever more unlike, but there was yet
another cause for the systematic unkindness under which the lad grew up.
Mr. Browning fell, as a hard man easily does, greatly under the influence
of his second wife, and this influence was made by her to subserve the
interests of a more than natural jealousy of her predecessor. An early
instance of this was her banishing the dead lady’s portrait to a garret,
on the plea that her husband did not need two wives. The son could be no
burden upon her because he had a little income, derived from his mother’s
brother; but this, probably, only heightened her ill-will towards him.
When he was old enough to go to a University, and very desirous of going—when,
moreover, he offered to do so at his own cost—she induced his father
to forbid it, because, she urged, they could not afford to send their
other sons to college. An earlier ambition of his had been to become an
artist; but when he showed his first completed picture to his father, the
latter turned away and refused to look at it. He gave himself the
finishing stroke in the parental eyes, by throwing up a lucrative
employment which he had held for a short time on his mother’s West Indian
property, in disgust at the system of slave labour which was still in
force there; and he paid for this unpractical conduct as soon as he was of
age, by the compulsory reimbursement of all the expenses which his father,
up to that date, had incurred for him; and by the loss of his mother’s
fortune, which, at the time of her marriage, had not been settled upon
her. It was probably in despair of doing anything better, that, soon after
this, in his twenty-second year, he also became a clerk in the Bank of
England. He married and settled in Camberwell, in 1811; his son and
daughter were born, respectively, in 1812 and 1814. He became a widower in
1849; and when, four years later, he had completed his term of service at
the Bank, he went with his daughter to Paris, where they resided until his
death in 1866.

Dr. Furnivall has originated a theory, and maintains it as a conviction,
that Mr. Browning’s grandmother was more than a Creole in the strict sense
of the term, that of a person born of white parents in the West Indies,
and that an unmistakable dash of dark blood passed from her to her son and
grandson. Such an occurrence was, on the face of it, not impossible, and
would be absolutely unimportant to my mind, and, I think I may add, to
that of Mr. Browning’s sister and son. The poet and his father were what
we know them, and if negro blood had any part in their composition, it was
no worse for them, and so much the better for the negro. But many persons
among us are very averse to the idea of such a cross; I believe its
assertion, in the present case, to be entirely mistaken; I prefer,
therefore, touching on the facts alleged in favour of it, to passing them
over in a silence which might be taken to mean indifference, but might
also be interpreted into assent.

We are told that Mr. Browning was so dark in early life, that a nephew who
saw him in Paris, in 1837, mistook him for an Italian. He neither had nor
could have had a nephew; and he was not out of England at the time
specified. It is said that when Mr. Browning senior was residing on his
mother’s sugar plantation at St. Kitt’s, his appearance was held to
justify his being placed in church among the coloured members of the
congregation. We are assured in the strongest terms that the story has no
foundation, and this by a gentleman whose authority in all matters
concerning the Browning family Dr. Furnivall has otherwise accepted as
conclusive. If the anecdote were true it would be a singular circumstance
that Mr. Browning senior was always fond of drawing negro heads, and thus
obviously disclaimed any unpleasant association with them.

I do not know the exact physical indications by which a dark strain is
perceived; but if they are to be sought in the colouring of eyes, hair,
and skin, they have been conspicuously absent in the two persons who in
the present case are supposed to have borne them. The poet’s father had
light blue eyes and, I am assured by those who knew him best, a clear,
ruddy complexion. His appearance induced strangers passing him in the
Paris streets to remark, ‘C’est un Anglais!’ The absolute whiteness of
Miss Browning’s skin was modified in her brother by a sallow tinge
sufficiently explained by frequent disturbance of the liver; but it never
affected the clearness of his large blue-grey eyes; and his hair, which
grew dark as he approached manhood, though it never became black, is
spoken of, by everyone who remembers him in childhood and youth, as
golden. It is no less worthy of note that the daughter of his early friend
Mr. Fox, who grew up in the little social circle to which he belonged,
never even heard of the dark cross now imputed to him; and a lady who made
his acquaintance during his twenty-fourth year, wrote a sonnet upon him,
beginning with these words:

The suggestion of Italian characteristics in the Poet’s face may serve,
however, to introduce a curious fact, which can have no bearing on the
main lines of his descent, but holds collateral possibilities concerning
it. His mother’s name Wiedemann or Wiedeman appears in a merely contracted
form as that of one of the oldest families naturalized in Venice. It
became united by marriage with the Rezzonico; and, by a strange
coincidence, the last of these who occupied the palace now owned by Mr.
Barrett Browning was a Widman-Rezzonico. The present Contessa Widman has
lately restored her own palace, which was falling into ruin.

That portrait of the first Mrs. Browning, which gave so much umbrage to
her husband’s second wife, has hung for many years in her grandson’s
dining-room, and is well known to all his friends. It represents a stately
woman with an unmistakably fair skin; and if the face or hair betrays any
indication of possible dark blood, it is imperceptible to the general
observer, and must be of too slight and fugitive a nature to enter into
the discussion. A long curl touches one shoulder. One hand rests upon a
copy of Thomson’s ‘Seasons’, which was held to be the proper study and
recreation of cultivated women in those days. The picture was painted by
Wright of Derby.

A brother of this lady was an adventurous traveller, and was said to have
penetrated farther into the interior of Africa than any other European of
his time. His violent death will be found recorded in a singular
experience of the poet’s middle life.

Chapter 2

Robert Browning’s Father—His Position in Life—Comparison
between him and his Son—Tenderness towards his Son—Outline of
his Habits and Character—His Death—Significant Newspaper
Paragraph—Letter of Mr. Locker-Lampson—Robert Browning’s
Mother—Her Character and Antecedents—Their Influence upon her
Son—Nervous Delicacy imparted to both her Children—Its special
Evidences in her Son.

It was almost a matter of course that Robert Browning’s father should be
disinclined for bank work. We are told, and can easily imagine, that he
was not so good an official as the grandfather; we know that he did not
rise so high, nor draw so large a salary. But he made the best of his
position for his family’s sake, and it was at that time both more
important and more lucrative than such appointments have since become. Its
emoluments could be increased by many honourable means not covered by the
regular salary. The working-day was short, and every additional hour’s
service well paid. To be enrolled on the night-watch was also very
remunerative; there were enormous perquisites in pens, paper, and
sealing-wax.* Mr. Browning availed himself of these opportunities of
adding to his income, and was thus enabled, with the help of his private
means, to gratify his scholarly and artistic tastes, and give his children
the benefit of a very liberal education—the one distinct ideal of
success in life which such a nature as his could form. Constituted as he
was, he probably suffered very little through the paternal unkindness
which had forced him into an uncongenial career. Its only palpable result
was to make him a more anxiously indulgent parent when his own time came.

Many circumstances conspired to secure to the coming poet a happier
childhood and youth than his father had had. His path was to be smoothed
not only by natural affection and conscientious care, but by literary and
artistic sympathy. The second Mr. Browning differed, in certain respects,
as much from the third as from the first. There were, nevertheless, strong
points in which, if he did not resemble, he at least distinctly
foreshadowed him; and the genius of the one would lack some possible
explanation if we did not recognize in great measure its organized
material in the other. Much, indeed, that was genius in the son existed as
talent in the father. The moral nature of the younger man diverged from
that of the older, though retaining strong points of similarity; but the
mental equipments of the two differed far less in themselves than in the
different uses to which temperament and circumstances trained them.

The most salient intellectual characteristic of Mr. Browning senior was
his passion for reading. In his daughter’s words, ‘he read in season, and
out of season;’ and he not only read, but remembered. As a schoolboy, he
knew by heart the first book of the ‘Iliad’, and all the odes of Horace;
and it shows how deeply the classical part of his training must have
entered into him, that he was wont, in later life, to soothe his little
boy to sleep by humming to him an ode of Anacreon. It was one of his
amusements at school to organize Homeric combats among the boys, in which
the fighting was carried on in the manner of the Greeks and Trojans, and
he and his friend Kenyon would arm themselves with swords and shields, and
hack at each other lustily, exciting themselves to battle by insulting
speeches derived from the Homeric text.*

Mr. Browning had also an extraordinary power of versifying, and taught his
son from babyhood the words he wished him to remember, by joining them to
a grotesque rhyme; the child learned all his Latin declensions in this
way. His love of art had been proved by his desire to adopt it as a
profession; his talent for it was evidenced by the life and power of the
sketches, often caricatures, which fell from his pen or pencil as easily
as written words. Mr. Barrett Browning remembers gaining a very early
elementary knowledge of anatomy from comic illustrated rhymes (now in the
possession of their old friend, Mrs. Fraser Corkran) through which his
grandfather impressed upon him the names and position of the principal
bones of the human body.

Even more remarkable than his delight in reading was the manner in which
Mr. Browning read. He carried into it all the preciseness of the scholar.
It was his habit when he bought a book—which was generally an old
one allowing of this addition—to have some pages of blank paper
bound into it. These he filled with notes, chronological tables, or such
other supplementary matter as would enhance the interest, or assist the
mastering, of its contents; all written in a clear and firm though by no
means formal handwriting. More than one book thus treated by him has
passed through my hands, leaving in me, it need hardly be said, a stronger
impression of the owner’s intellectual quality than the acquisition by him
of the finest library could have conveyed. One of the experiences which
disgusted him with St. Kitt’s was the frustration by its authorities of an
attempt he was making to teach a negro boy to read, and the understanding
that all such educative action was prohibited.

In his faculties and attainments, as in his pleasures and appreciations,
he showed the simplicity and genuineness of a child. He was not only ready
to amuse, he could always identify himself with children, his love for
whom never failed him in even his latest years. His more than childlike
indifference to pecuniary advantages had been shown in early life. He gave
another proof of it after his wife’s death, when he declined a proposal,
made to him by the Bank of England, to assist in founding one of its
branch establishments in Liverpool. He never indeed, personally, cared for
money, except as a means of acquiring old, i.e. rare books, for which he
had, as an acquaintance declared, the scent of a hound and the snap of a
bulldog. His eagerness to possess such treasures was only matched by the
generosity with which he parted with them; and his daughter well remembers
the feeling of angry suspicion with which she and her brother noted the
periodical arrival of a certain visitor who would be closeted with their
father for hours, and steal away before the supper time, when the family
would meet, with some precious parcel of books or prints under his arm.

It is almost superfluous to say that he was indifferent to creature
comforts. Miss Browning was convinced that, if on any occasion she had
said to him, ‘There will be no dinner to-day,’ he would only have looked
up from his book to reply, ‘All right, my dear, it is of no consequence.’
In his bank-clerk days, when he sometimes dined in Town, he left one
restaurant with which he was not otherwise dissatisfied, because the
waiter always gave him the trouble of specifying what he would have to
eat. A hundred times that trouble would not have deterred him from a
kindly act. Of his goodness of heart, indeed, many distinct instances
might be given; but even this scanty outline of his life has rendered them
superfluous.

Mr. Browning enjoyed splendid physical health. His early love of reading
had not precluded a wholesome enjoyment of athletic sports; and he was, as
a boy, the fastest runner and best base-ball player in his school. He
died, like his father, at eighty-four (or rather, within a few days of
eighty-five), but, unlike him, he had never been ill; a French friend
exclaimed when all was over, ‘Il n’a jamais ete vieux.’ His faculties were
so unclouded up to the last moment that he could watch himself dying, and
speculate on the nature of the change which was befalling him. ‘What do
you think death is, Robert?’ he said to his son; ‘is it a fainting, or is
it a pang?’ A notice of his decease appeared in an American newspaper. It
was written by an unknown hand, and bears a stamp of genuineness which
renders the greater part of it worth quoting.

‘He was not only a ruddy, active man, with fine hair, that retained its
strength and brownness to the last, but he had a courageous spirit and a
remarkably intelligent mind. He was a man of the finest culture, and was
often, and never vainly, consulted by his son Robert concerning the more
recondite facts relating to the old characters, whose bones that poet
liked so well to disturb. His knowledge of old French, Spanish, and
Italian literature was wonderful. The old man went smiling and peaceful to
his long rest, preserving his faculties to the last, insomuch that the
physician, astonished at his continued calmness and good humour, turned to
his daughter, and said in a low voice, “Does this gentleman know that he
is dying?” The daughter said in a voice which the father could hear, “He
knows it;” and the old man said with a quiet smile, “Death is no enemy in
my eyes.” His last words were spoken to his son Robert, who was fanning
him, “I fear I am wearying you, dear.”‘

Four years later one of his English acquaintances in Paris, Mr. Frederick
Locker, now Mr. Locker-Lampson, wrote to Robert Browning as follows:

Dec. 26, 1870.

My dear Browning,—I have always thought that you or Miss Browning,
or some other capable person, should draw up a sketch of your excellent
father so that, hereafter, it might be known what an interesting man he
was.

I used often to meet you in Paris, at Lady Elgin’s. She had a genuine
taste for poetry, and she liked being read to, and I remember you gave her
a copy of Keats’ poems, and you used often to read his poetry to her. Lady
Elgin died in 1860, and I think it was in that year that Lady Charlotte
and I saw the most of Mr. Browning.* He was then quite an elderly man, if
years could make him so, but he had so much vivacity of manner, and such
simplicity and freshness of mind, that it was difficult to think him old.

I remember, he and your sister lived in an apartment in the Rue de
Grenelle, St. Germain, in quite a simple fashion, much in the way that
most people live in Paris, and in the way that all sensible people would
wish to live all over the world.

Your father and I had at least one taste and affection in common. He liked
hunting the old bookstalls on the ‘quais’, and he had a great love and
admiration for Hogarth; and he possessed several of Hogarth’s engravings,
some in rare and early states of the plate; and he would relate with glee
the circumstances under which he had picked them up, and at so small a
price too! However, he had none of the ‘petit-maitre’ weakness of the
ordinary collector, which is so common, and which I own to!—such as
an infatuation for tall copies, and wide margins.

I remember your father was fond of drawing in a rough and ready fashion;
he had plenty of talent, I should think not very great cultivation; but
quite enough to serve his purpose, and to amuse his friends. He had a
thoroughly lively and healthy interest in your poetry, and he
showed me some of your boyish attempts at versification.

Taking your dear father altogether, I quite believe him to have been one
of those men—interesting men—whom the world never hears of.
Perhaps he was shy—at any rate he was much less known than he ought
to have been; and now, perhaps, he only remains in the recollection of his
family, and of one or two superior people (like myself!) who were capable
of appreciating him. My dear Browning, I really hope you will draw up a
slight sketch of your father before it is too late. Yours, Frederick
Locker.

The judgments thus expressed twenty years ago are cordially re-stated in
the letter in which Mr. Locker-Lampson authorizes me to publish them. The
desired memoir was never written; but the few details which I have given
of the older Mr. Browning’s life and character may perhaps stand for it.

With regard to the ‘strict dissent’ with which her parents have been
taxed, Miss Browning writes to me: ‘My father was born and educated in the
Church of England, and, for many years before his death, lived in her
communion. He became a Dissenter in middle life, and my mother, born and
brought up in the Kirk of Scotland, became one also; but they could not be
called bigoted, since we always in the evening attended the preaching of
the Rev. Henry Melvill* (afterwards Canon of St. Paul’s), whose sermons
Robert much admired.’**

Little need be said about the poet’s mother. She was spoken of by Carlyle
as ‘the true type of a Scottish gentlewoman.’ Mr. Kenyon declared that
such as she had no need to go to heaven, because they made it wherever
they were. But her character was all resumed in her son’s words, spoken
with the tremulous emotion which so often accompanied his allusion to
those he had loved and lost: ‘She was a divine woman.’ She was Scotch on
the maternal side, and her kindly, gentle, but distinctly evangelical
Christianity must have been derived from that source. Her father, William
Wiedemann, a ship-owner, was a Hamburg German settled in Dundee, and has
been described by Mr. Browning as an accomplished draughtsman and
musician. She herself had nothing of the artist about her, though we hear
of her sometimes playing the piano; in all her goodness and sweetness she
seems to have been somewhat matter-of-fact. But there is abundant indirect
evidence of Mr. Browning’s love of music having come to him through her,
and we are certainly justified in holding the Scottish-German descent as
accountable, in great measure at least, for the metaphysical quality so
early apparent in the poet’s mind, and of which we find no evidence in
that of his father. His strong religious instincts must have been derived
from both parents, though most anxiously fostered by his mother.

There is yet another point on which Mrs. Browning must have influenced the
life and destinies of her son, that of physical health, or, at least,
nervous constitution. She was a delicate woman, very anaemic during her
later years, and a martyr to neuralgia, which was perhaps a symptom of
this condition. The acute ailment reproduced itself in her daughter in
spite of an otherwise vigorous constitution. With the brother, the
inheritance of suffering was not less surely present, if more difficult to
trace. We have been accustomed to speaking of him as a brilliantly healthy
man; he was healthy, even strong, in many essential respects. Until past
the age of seventy he could take long walks without fatigue, and endure an
amount of social and general physical strain which would have tried many
younger men. He carried on until the last a large, if not always serious,
correspondence, and only within the latest months, perhaps weeks of his
life, did his letters even suggest that physical brain-power was failing
him. He had, within the limits which his death has assigned to it, a
considerable recuperative power. His consciousness of health was vivid, so
long as he was well; and it was only towards the end that the faith in his
probable length of days occasionally deserted him. But he died of no acute
disease, more than seven years younger than his father, having long
carried with him external marks of age from which his father remained
exempt. Till towards the age of forty he suffered from attacks of
sore-throat, not frequent, but of an angry kind. He was constantly
troubled by imperfect action of the liver, though no doctor pronounced the
evil serious. I have spoken of this in reference to his complexion. During
the last twenty years, if not for longer, he rarely spent a winter without
a suffocating cold and cough; within the last five, asthmatic symptoms
established themselves; and when he sank under what was perhaps his first
real attack of bronchitis it was not because the attack was very severe,
but because the heart was exhausted. The circumstances of his death
recalled that of his mother; and we might carry the sad analogy still
farther in his increasing pallor, and the slow and not strong pulse which
always characterized him. This would perhaps be a mistake. It is difficult
to reconcile any idea of bloodlessness with the bounding vitality of his
younger body and mind. Any symptom of organic disease could scarcely, in
his case, have been overlooked. But so much is certain: he was conscious
of what he called a nervousness of nature which neither father nor
grandfather could have bequeathed to him. He imputed to this, or, in other
words, to an undue physical sensitiveness to mental causes of irritation,
his proneness to deranged liver, and the asthmatic conditions which he
believed, rightly or wrongly, to be produced by it. He was perhaps
mistaken in some of his inferences, but he was not mistaken in the fact.
He had the pleasures as well as the pains of this nervous temperament; its
quick response to every congenial stimulus of physical atmosphere, and
human contact. It heightened the enjoyment, perhaps exaggerated the
consciousness of his physical powers. It also certainly in his later years
led him to overdraw them. Many persons have believed that he could not
live without society; a prolonged seclusion from it would, for obvious
reasons, have been unsuited to him. But the excited gaiety which to the
last he carried into every social gathering was often primarily the result
of a moral and physical effort which his temperament prompted, but his
strength could not always justify. Nature avenged herself in recurrent
periods of exhaustion, long before the closing stage had set in.

I shall subsequently have occasion to trace this nervous impressibility
through various aspects and relations of his life; all I now seek to show
is that this healthiest of poets and most real of men was not compounded
of elements of pure health, and perhaps never could have been so. It might
sound grotesque to say that only a delicate woman could have been the
mother of Robert Browning. The fact remains that of such a one, and no
other, he was born; and we may imagine, without being fanciful, that his
father’s placid intellectual powers required for their transmutation into
poetic genius just this infusion of a vital element not only charged with
other racial and individual qualities, but physically and morally more
nearly allied to pain. Perhaps, even for his happiness as a man, we could
not have wished it otherwise.

Chapter 3

1812-1826

Birth of Robert Browning—His Childhood and Schooldays—Restless
Temperament—Brilliant Mental Endowments—Incidental
Peculiarities—Strong Religious Feeling—Passionate Attachment
to his Mother; Grief at first Separation—Fondness for Animals—Experiences
of School Life—Extensive Reading—Early Attempts in Verse—Letter
from his Father concerning them—Spurious Poems in Circulation—’Incondita’—Mr.
Fox—Miss Flower.

Robert Browning was born, as has been often repeated, at Camberwell, on
May 7, 1812, soon after a great comet had disappeared from the sky. He was
a handsome, vigorous, fearless child, and soon developed an unresting
activity and a fiery temper. He clamoured for occupation from the moment
he could speak. His mother could only keep him quiet when once he had
emerged from infancy by telling him stories—doubtless Bible stories—while
holding him on her knee. His energies were of course destructive till they
had found their proper outlet; but we do not hear of his ever having
destroyed anything for the mere sake of doing so. His first recorded piece
of mischief was putting a handsome Brussels lace veil of his mother’s into
the fire; but the motive, which he was just old enough to lisp out, was
also his excuse: ‘A pitty baze [pretty blaze], mamma.’ Imagination soon
came to his rescue. It has often been told how he extemporized verse aloud
while walking round and round the dining-room table supporting himself by
his hands, when he was still so small that his head was scarcely above it.
He remembered having entertained his mother in the very first walk he was
considered old enough to take with her, by a fantastic account of his
possessions in houses, &c., of which the topographical details
elicited from her the remark, ‘Why, sir, you are quite a geographer.’ And
though this kind of romancing is common enough among intelligent children,
it distinguishes itself in this case by the strong impression which the
incident had left on his own mind. It seems to have been a first real
flight of dramatic fancy, confusing his identity for the time being.

The power of inventing did not, however, interfere with his readiness to
learn, and the facility with which he acquired whatever knowledge came in
his way had, on one occasion, inconvenient results. A lady of reduced
fortunes kept a small elementary school for boys, a stone’s-throw from his
home; and he was sent to it as a day boarder at so tender an age that his
parents, it is supposed, had no object in view but to get rid of his
turbulent activity for an hour or two every morning and afternoon.
Nevertheless, his proficiency in reading and spelling was soon so much
ahead of that of the biggest boy, that complaints broke out among the
mammas, who were sure there was not fair play. Mrs.——was
neglecting her other pupils for the sake of ‘bringing on Master Browning;’
and the poor lady found it necessary to discourage Master Browning’s
attendance lest she should lose the remainder of her flock. This, at
least, was the story as he himself remembered it. According to Miss
Browning his instructress did not yield without a parting shot. She
retorted on the discontented parents that, if she could give their
children ‘Master Browning’s intellect’, she would have no difficulty in
satisfying them. After this came the interlude of home-teaching, in which
all his elementary knowledge must have been gained. As an older child he
was placed with two Misses Ready, who prepared boys for entering their
brother’s (the Rev. Thomas Ready’s) school; and in due time he passed into
the latter, where he remained up to the age of fourteen.

He seems in those early days to have had few playmates beyond his sister,
two years younger than himself, and whom his irrepressible spirit must
sometimes have frightened or repelled. Nor do we hear anything of childish
loves; and though an entry appeared in his diary one Sunday in about the
seventh or eighth year of his age, ‘married two wives this morning,’ it
only referred to a vague imaginary appropriation of two girls whom he had
just seen in church, and whose charm probably lay in their being much
bigger than he. He was, however, capable of a self-conscious shyness in
the presence of even a little girl; and his sense of certain proprieties
was extraordinarily keen. He told a friend that on one occasion, when the
merest child, he had edged his way by the wall from one point of his
bedroom to another, because he was not fully clothed, and his reflection
in the glass could otherwise have been seen through the partly open door.*

His imaginative emotions were largely absorbed by religion. The early
Biblical training had had its effect, and he was, to use his own words,
‘passionately religious’ in those nursery years; but during them and many
succeeding ones, his mother filled his heart. He loved her so much, he has
been heard to say, that even as a grown man he could not sit by her
otherwise than with an arm round her waist. It is difficult to measure the
influence which this feeling may have exercised on his later life; it led,
even now, to a strange and touching little incident which had in it the
incipient poet no less than the loving child. His attendance at Miss
Ready’s school only kept him from home from Monday till Saturday of every
week; but when called upon to confront his first five days of banishment
he felt sure that he would not survive them. A leaden cistern belonging to
the school had in, or outside it, the raised image of a face. He chose the
cistern for his place of burial, and converted the face into his epitaph
by passing his hand over and over it to a continuous chant of: ‘In memory
of unhappy Browning’—the ceremony being renewed in his spare
moments, till the acute stage of the feeling had passed away.

The fondness for animals for which through life he was noted, was
conspicuous in his very earliest days. His urgent demand for ‘something to
do’ would constantly include ‘something to be caught’ for him: ‘they were
to catch him an eft;’ ‘they were to catch him a frog.’ He would refuse to
take his medicine unless bribed by the gift of a speckled frog from among
the strawberries; and the maternal parasol, hovering above the strawberry
bed during the search for this object of his desires, remained a standing
picture in his remembrance. But the love of the uncommon was already
asserting itself; and one of his very juvenile projects was a collection
of rare creatures, the first contribution to which was a couple of
lady-birds, picked up one winter’s day on a wall and immediately consigned
to a box lined with cotton-wool, and labelled, ‘Animals found surviving in
the depths of a severe winter.’ Nor did curiosity in this case weaken the
power of sympathy. His passion for birds and beasts was the counterpart of
his father’s love of children, only displaying itself before the age at
which child-love naturally appears. His mother used to read Croxall’s
Fables to his little sister and him. The story contained in them of a lion
who was kicked to death by an ass affected him so painfully that he could
no longer endure the sight of the book; and as he dared not destroy it, he
buried it between the stuffing and the woodwork of an old dining-room
chair, where it stood for lost, at all events for the time being. When
first he heard the adventures of the parrot who insisted on leaving his
cage, and who enjoyed himself for a little while and then died of hunger
and cold, he—and his sister with him—cried so bitterly that it
was found necessary to invent a different ending, according to which the
parrot was rescued just in time and brought back to his cage to live
peacefully in it ever after.

As a boy, he kept owls and monkeys, magpies and hedgehogs, an eagle, and
even a couple of large snakes, constantly bringing home the more portable
creatures in his pockets, and transferring them to his mother for
immediate care. I have heard him speak admiringly of the skilful
tenderness with which she took into her lap a lacerated cat, washed and
sewed up its ghastly wound, and nursed it back to health. The great
intimacy with the life and habits of animals which reveals itself in his
works is readily explained by these facts.

Mr. Ready’s establishment was chosen for him as the best in the
neighbourhood; and both there and under the preparatory training of that
gentleman’s sisters, the young Robert was well and kindly cared for. The
Misses Ready especially concerned themselves with the spiritual welfare of
their pupils. The periodical hair-brushings were accompanied by the
singing, and fell naturally into the measure, of Watts’s hymns; and Mr.
Browning has given his friends some very hearty laughs by illustrating
with voice and gesture the ferocious emphasis with which the brush would
swoop down in the accentuated syllables of the following lines:

He even compelled his mother to laugh at it, though it was sorely against
her nature to lend herself to any burlesquing of piously intended things.*
He had become a bigger boy since the episode of the cistern, and had
probably in some degree outgrown the intense piety of his earlier
childhood. This little incident seems to prove it. On the whole, however,
his religious instincts did not need strengthening, though his sense of
humour might get the better of them for a moment; and of secular
instruction he seems to have received as little from the one set of
teachers as from the other. I do not suppose that the mental training at
Mr. Ready’s was more shallow or more mechanical than that of most other
schools of his own or, indeed, of a much later period; but the brilliant
abilities of Robert Browning inspired him with a certain contempt for it,
as also for the average schoolboy intelligence to which it was apparently
adapted. It must be for this reason that, as he himself declared, he never
gained a prize, although these rewards were showered in such profusion
that the only difficulty was to avoid them; and if he did not make friends
at school (for this also has been somewhere observed),** it can only be
explained in the same way. He was at an intolerant age, and if his
schoolfellows struck him as more backward or more stupid than they need
be, he is not likely to have taken pains to conceal the impression. It is
difficult, at all events, to think of him as unsociable, and his talents
certainly had their amusing side. Miss Browning tells me that he made his
schoolfellows act plays, some of which he had written for them; and he
delighted his friends, not long ago, by mimicking his own solemn
appearance on some breaking-up or commemorative day, when, according to
programme, ‘Master Browning’ ascended a platform in the presence of
assembled parents and friends, and, in best jacket, white gloves, and
carefully curled hair, with a circular bow to the company and the then
prescribed waving of alternate arms, delivered a high-flown rhymed address
of his own composition.

And during the busy idleness of his schooldays, or, at all events, in the
holidays in which he rested from it, he was learning, as perhaps only
those do learn whose real education is derived from home. His father’s
house was, Miss Browning tells me, literally crammed with books; and, she
adds, ‘it was in this way that Robert became very early familiar with
subjects generally unknown to boys.’ He read omnivorously, though
certainly not without guidance. One of the books he best and earliest
loved was ‘Quarles’ Emblemes’, which his father possessed in a seventeenth
century edition, and which contains one or two very tentative specimens of
his early handwriting. Its quaint, powerful lines and still quainter
illustrations combined the marvellous with what he believed to be true;
and he seemed specially identified with its world of religious fancies by
the fact that the soul in it was always depicted as a child. On its more
general grounds his reading was at once largely literary and very
historical; and it was in this direction that the paternal influence was
most strongly revealed. ‘Quarles’ Emblemes’ was only one of the large
collection of old books which Mr. Browning possessed; and the young Robert
learnt to know each favourite author in the dress as well as the language
which carried with it the life of his period. The first edition of
‘Robinson Crusoe’; the first edition of Milton’s works, bought for him by
his father; a treatise on astrology published twenty years after the
introduction of printing; the original pamphlet ‘Killing no Murder’
(1559), which Carlyle borrowed for his ‘Life of Cromwell’; an equally
early copy of Bernard Mandeville’s ‘Bees’; very ancient Bibles—are
some of the instances which occur to me. Among more modern publications,
‘Walpole’s Letters’ were familiar to him in boyhood, as well as the
‘Letters of Junius’ and all the works of Voltaire.

Ancient poets and poetry also played their necessary part in the mental
culture superintended by Robert Browning’s father: we can indeed imagine
no case in which they would not have found their way into the boy’s life.
Latin poets and Greek dramatists came to him in their due time, though his
special delight in the Greek language only developed itself later. But his
loving, lifelong familiarity with the Elizabethan school, and indeed with
the whole range of English poetry, seems to point to a more constant study
of our national literature. Byron was his chief master in those early
poetic days. He never ceased to honour him as the one poet who combined a
constructive imagination with the more technical qualities of his art; and
the result of this period of aesthetic training was a volume of short
poems produced, we are told, when he was only twelve, in which the Byronic
influence was predominant.

The young author gave his work the title of ‘Incondita’, which conveyed a
certain idea of deprecation. He was, nevertheless, very anxious to see it
in print; and his father and mother, poetry-lovers of the old school, also
found in it sufficient merit to justify its publication. No publisher,
however, could be found; and we can easily believe that he soon afterwards
destroyed the little manuscript, in some mingled reaction of
disappointment and disgust. But his mother, meanwhile, had shown it to an
acquaintance of hers, Miss Flower, who herself admired its contents so
much as to make a copy of them for the inspection of her friend, the
well-known Unitarian minister, Mr. W. J. Fox. The copy was transmitted to
Mr. Browning after Mr. Fox’s death by his daughter, Mrs. Bridell-Fox; and
this, if no other, was in existence in 1871, when, at his urgent request,
that lady also returned to him a fragment of verse contained in a letter
from Miss Sarah Flower. Nor was it till much later that a friend, who had
earnestly begged for a sight of it, definitely heard of its destruction.
The fragment, which doubtless shared the same fate, was, I am told, a
direct imitation of Coleridge’s ‘Fire, Famine, and Slaughter’.

These poems were not Mr. Browning’s first. It would be impossible to
believe them such when we remember that he composed verses long before he
could write; and a curious proof of the opposite fact has recently
appeared. Two letters of the elder Mr. Browning have found their way into
the market, and have been bought respectively by Mr. Dykes Campbell and
Sir F. Leighton. I give the more important of them. It was addressed to
Mr. Thomas Powell:

Dear Sir,—I hope the enclosed may be acceptable as curiosities. They
were written by Robert when quite a child. I once had nearly a hundred of
them. But he has destroyed all that ever came in his way, having a great
aversion to the practice of many biographers in recording every trifling
incident that falls in their way. He has not the slightest suspicion that
any of his very juvenile performances are in existence. I have several of
the originals by me. They are all extemporaneous productions, nor has any
one a single alteration. There was one amongst them ‘On Bonaparte’—remarkably
beautiful—and had I not seen it in his own handwriting I never would
have believed it to have been the production of a child. It is destroyed.
Pardon my troubling you with these specimens, and requesting you never to
mention it, as Robert would be very much hurt. I remain, dear sir, Your
obedient servant, R. Browning. Bank: March 11, 1843.

The letter was accompanied by a sheet of verses which have been sold and
resold, doubtless in perfect good faith, as being those to which the
writer alludes. But Miss Browning has recognized them as her father’s own
impromptu epigrams, well remembered in the family, together with the
occasion on which they were written. The substitution may, from the first,
have been accidental.

We cannot think of all these vanished first-fruits of Mr. Browning’s
genius without a sense of loss, all the greater perhaps that there can
have been little in them to prefigure its later forms. Their faults seem
to have lain in the direction of too great splendour of language and too
little wealth of thought; and Mr. Fox, who had read ‘Incondita’ and been
struck by its promise, confessed afterwards to Mr. Browning that he had
feared these tendencies as his future snare. But the imitative first note
of a young poet’s voice may hold a rapture of inspiration which his most
original later utterances will never convey. It is the child Sordello,
singing against the lark.

Not even the poet’s sister ever saw ‘Incondita’. It was the only one of
his finished productions which Miss Browning did not read, or even help
him to write out. She was then too young to be taken into his confidence.
Its writing, however, had one important result. It procured for the
boy-poet a preliminary introduction to the valuable literary patron and
friend Mr. Fox was subsequently to be. It also supplies the first
substantial record of an acquaintance which made a considerable impression
on his personal life.

The Miss Flower, of whom mention has been made, was one of two sisters,
both sufficiently noted for their artistic gifts to have found a place in
the new Dictionary of National Biography. The elder, Eliza or Lizzie, was
a musical composer; the younger, best known as Sarah Flower Adams, a
writer of sacred verse. Her songs and hymns, including the well-known
‘Nearer, my God, to Thee’, were often set to music by her sister.* They
sang, I am told, delightfully together, and often without accompaniment,
their voices perfectly harmonizing with each other. Both were, in their
different ways, very attractive; both interesting, not only from their
talents, but from their attachment to each other, and the delicacy which
shortened their lives. They died of consumption, the elder in 1846, at the
age of forty-three; the younger a year later. They became acquainted with
Mrs. Browning through a common friend, Miss Sturtevant; and the young
Robert conceived a warm admiration for Miss Flower’s talents, and a boyish
love for herself. She was nine years his senior; her own affections became
probably engaged, and, as time advanced, his feeling seems to have
subsided into one of warm and very loyal friendship. We hear, indeed, of
his falling in love, as he was emerging from his teens, with a handsome
girl who was on a visit at his father’s house. But the fancy died out ‘for
want of root.’ The admiration, even tenderness, for Miss Flower had so
deep a ‘root’ that he never in latest life mentioned her name with
indifference. In a letter to Mr. Dykes Campbell, in 1881, he spoke of her
as ‘a very remarkable person.’ If, in spite of his denials, any woman
inspired ‘Pauline’, it can have been no other than she. He began writing
to her at twelve or thirteen, probably on the occasion of her expressed
sympathy with his first distinct effort at authorship; and what he
afterwards called ‘the few utterly insignificant scraps of letters and
verse’ which formed his part of the correspondence were preserved by her
as long as she lived. But he recovered and destroyed them after his return
to England, with all the other reminiscences of those early years. Some
notes, however, are extant, dated respectively, 1841, 1842, and 1845, and
will be given in their due place.

Mr. Fox was a friend of Miss Flower’s father (Benjamin Flower, known as
editor of the ‘Cambridge Intelligencer’), and, at his death, in 1829,
became co-executor to his will, and a kind of guardian to his daughters,
then both unmarried, and motherless from their infancy. Eliza’s principal
work was a collection of hymns and anthems, originally composed for Mr.
Fox’s chapel, where she had assumed the entire management of the choral
part of the service. Her abilities were not confined to music; she
possessed, I am told, an instinctive taste and judgment in literary
matters which caused her opinion to be much valued by literary men. But
Mr. Browning’s genuine appreciation of her musical genius was probably the
strongest permanent bond between them. We shall hear of this in his own
words.

Chapter 4

1826-1833

First Impressions of Keats and Shelley—Prolonged Influence of
Shelley—Details of Home Education—Its Effects—Youthful
Restlessness—Counteracting Love of Home—Early Friendships:
Alfred Domett, Joseph Arnould, the Silverthornes—Choice of Poetry as
a Profession—Alternative Suggestions; mistaken Rumours concerning
them—Interest in Art—Love of good Theatrical Performances—Talent
for Acting—Final Preparation for Literary Life.

At the period at which we have arrived, which is that of his leaving
school and completing his fourteenth year, another and a significant
influence was dawning on Robert Browning’s life—the influence of the
poet Shelley. Mr. Sharp writes,* and I could only state the facts in
similar words, ‘Passing a bookstall one day, he saw, in a box of
second-hand volumes, a little book advertised as “Mr. Shelley’s
Atheistical Poem: very scarce.”‘ . . . ‘From vague remarks in reply to his
inquiries, and from one or two casual allusions, he learned that there
really was a poet called Shelley; that he had written several volumes;
that he was dead.’ . . . ‘He begged his mother to procure him Shelley’s
works, a request not easily complied with, for the excellent reason that
not one of the local booksellers had even heard of the poet’s name.
Ultimately, however, Mrs. Browning learned that what she sought was
procurable at the Olliers’, in Vere Street, London.’

Mrs. Browning went to Messrs. Ollier, and brought back ‘most of Shelley’s
writings, all in their first edition, with the exception of “The Cenci”.’
She brought also three volumes of the still less known John Keats, on
being assured that one who liked Shelley’s works would like these also.

Keats and Shelley must always remain connected in this epoch of Mr.
Browning’s poetic growth. They indeed came to him as the two nightingales
which, he told some friends, sang together in the May-night which closed
this eventful day: one in the laburnum in his father’s garden, the other
in a copper beech which stood on adjoining ground—with the
difference indeed, that he must often have listened to the feathered
singers before, while the two new human voices sounded from what were to
him, as to so many later hearers, unknown heights and depths of the
imaginative world. Their utterance was, to such a spirit as his, the last,
as in a certain sense the first, word of what poetry can say; and no one
who has ever heard him read the ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, and repeat in the
same subdued tones, as if continuing his own thoughts, some line from
‘Epipsychidion’, can doubt that they retained a lasting and almost equal
place in his poet’s heart. But the two cannot be regarded as equals in
their relation to his life, and it would be a great mistake to impute to
either any important influence upon his genius. We may catch some fleeting
echoes of Keats’s melody in ‘Pippa Passes’; it is almost a commonplace
that some measure of Shelleyan fancy is recognizable in ‘Pauline’. But the
poetic individuality of Robert Browning was stronger than any circumstance
through which it could be fed. It would have found nourishment in desert
air. With his first accepted work he threw off what was foreign to his
poetic nature, to be thenceforward his own never-to-be-subdued and
never-to-be-mistaken self. If Shelley became, and long remained for him,
the greatest poet of his age—of almost any age—it was not
because he held him greatest in the poetic art, but because in his case,
beyond all others, he believed its exercise to have been prompted by the
truest spiritual inspiration.

It is difficult to trace the process by which this conviction formed
itself in the boy’s mind; still more to account for the strong personal
tenderness which accompanied it. The facts can have been scarcely known
which were to present Shelley to his imagination as a maligned and
persecuted man. It is hard to judge how far such human qualities as we now
read into his work, could be apparent to one who only approached him
through it. But the extra-human note in Shelley’s genius irresistibly
suggested to the Browning of fourteen, as it still did to the Browning of
forty, the presence of a lofty spirit, one dwelling in the communion of
higher things. There was often a deep sadness in his utterance; the
consecration of an early death was upon him. And so the worship rooted
itself and grew. It was to find its lyrical expression in ‘Pauline’; its
rational and, from the writer’s point of view, philosophic justification
in the prose essay on Shelley, published eighteen years afterwards.

It may appear inconsistent with the nature of this influence that it began
by appealing to him in a subversive form. The Shelley whom Browning first
loved was the Shelley of ‘Queen Mab’, the Shelley who would have
remodelled the whole system of religious belief, as of human duty and
rights; and the earliest result of the new development was that he became
a professing atheist, and, for two years, a practising vegetarian. He
returned to his natural diet when he found his eyesight becoming weak. The
atheism cured itself; we do not exactly know when or how. What we do know
is, that it was with him a passing state of moral or imaginative
rebellion, and not one of rational doubt. His mind was not so constituted
that such doubt could fasten itself upon it; nor did he ever in after-life
speak of this period of negation except as an access of boyish folly, with
which his maturer self could have no concern. The return to religious
belief did not shake his faith in his new prophet. It only made him
willing to admit that he had misread him.

This Shelley period of Robert Browning’s life—that which intervened
between ‘Incondita’ and ‘Pauline’—remained, nevertheless, one of
rebellion and unrest, to which many circumstances may have contributed
besides the influence of the one mind. It had been decided that he was to
complete, or at all events continue, his education at home; and, knowing
the elder Mr. Browning as we do, we cannot doubt that the best reasons, of
kindness or expediency, led to his so deciding. It was none the less,
probably, a mistake, for the time being. The conditions of home life were
the more favourable for the young poet’s imaginative growth; but there can
rarely have been a boy whose moral and mental health had more to gain by
the combined discipline and freedom of a public school. His home training
was made to include everything which in those days went to the production
of an accomplished gentleman, and a great deal therefore that was
physically good. He learned music, singing, dancing, riding, boxing, and
fencing, and excelled in the more active of these pursuits. The study of
music was also serious, and carried on under two masters. Mr. John Relfe,
author of a valuable work on counterpoint, was his instructor in
thorough-bass; Mr. Abel, a pupil of Moscheles, in execution. He wrote
music for songs which he himself sang; among them Donne’s ‘Go and catch a
falling star’; Hood’s ‘I will not have the mad Clytie’; Peacock’s ‘The
mountain sheep are sweeter’; and his settings, all of which he
subsequently destroyed, were, I am told, very spirited. His education
seems otherwise to have been purely literary. For two years, from the age
of fourteen to that of sixteen, he studied with a French tutor, who,
whether this was intended or not, imparted to him very little but a good
knowledge of the French language and literature. In his eighteenth year he
attended, for a term or two, a Greek class at the London University. His
classical and other reading was probably continued. But we hear nothing in
the programme of mathematics, or logic—of any, in short, of those
subjects which train, even coerce, the thinking powers, and which were
doubly requisite for a nature in which the creative imagination was
predominant over all the other mental faculties, great as these other
faculties were. And, even as poet, he suffered from this omission: since
the involutions and overlappings of thought and phrase, which occur in his
earlier and again in his latest works, must have been partly due to his
never learning to follow the processes of more normally constituted minds.
It would be a great error to suppose that they ever arose from the absence
of a meaning clearly felt, if not always clearly thought out, by himself.
He was storing his memory and enriching his mind; but precisely in so
doing he was nourishing the consciousness of a very vivid and urgent
personality; and, under the restrictions inseparable from the life of a
home-bred youth, it was becoming a burden to him. What outlet he found in
verse we do not know, because nothing survives of what he may then have
written. It is possible that the fate of his early poems, and, still more,
the change of ideals, retarded the definite impulse towards poetic
production. It would be a relief to him to sketch out and elaborate the
plan of his future work—his great mental portrait gallery of typical
men and women; and he was doing so during at least the later years which
preceded the birth of ‘Pauline’. But even this must have been the result
of some protracted travail with himself; because it was only the inward
sense of very varied possibilities of existence which could have impelled
him towards this kind of creation. No character he ever produced was
merely a figment of the brain.

It was natural, therefore, that during this time of growth he should have
been, not only more restless, but less amiable than at any other. The
always impatient temper assumed a quality of aggressiveness. He behaved as
a youth will who knows himself to be clever, and believes that he is not
appreciated, because the crude or paradoxical forms which his cleverness
assumes do not recommend it to his elders’ minds. He set the judgments of
those about him at defiance, and gratuitously proclaimed himself
everything that he was, and some things that he was not. All this subdued
itself as time advanced, and the coming man in him could throw off the
wayward child. It was all so natural that it might well be forgotten. But
it distressed his mother, the one being in the world whom he entirely
loved; and deserves remembering in the tender sorrow with which he himself
remembered it. He was always ready to say that he had been worth little in
his young days; indeed, his self-depreciation covered the greater part of
his life. This was, perhaps, one reason of the difficulty of inducing him
to dwell upon his past. ‘I am better now,’ he has said more than once,
when its reminiscences have been invoked.

One tender little bond maintained itself between his mother and himself so
long as he lived under the paternal roof; it was his rule never to go to
bed without giving her a good-night kiss. If he was out so late that he
had to admit himself with a latch-key, he nevertheless went to her in her
room. Nor did he submit to this as a necessary restraint; for, except on
the occasions of his going abroad, it is scarcely on record that he ever
willingly spent a night away from home. It may not stand for much, or it
may stand to the credit of his restlessness, that, when he had been placed
with some gentleman in Gower Street, for the convenience of attending the
University lectures, or for the sake of preparing for them, he broke
through the arrangement at the end of a week; but even an agreeable visit
had no power to detain him beyond a few days.

This home-loving quality was in curious contrast to the natural
bohemianism of youthful genius, and the inclination to wildness which
asserted itself in his boyish days. It became the more striking as he
entered upon the age at which no reasonable amount of freedom can have
been denied to him. Something, perhaps, must be allowed for the pecuniary
dependence which forbade his forming any expensive habits of amusement;
but he also claims the credit of having been unable to accept any low-life
pleasures in place of them. I do not know how the idea can have arisen
that he willingly sought his experience in the society of ‘gipsies and
tramps’. I remember nothing in his works which even suggests such
association; and it is certain that a few hours spent at a fair would at
all times have exhausted his capability of enduring it. In the most
audacious imaginings of his later life, in the most undisciplined acts of
his early youth, were always present curious delicacies and reserves.
There was always latent in him the real goodness of heart which would not
allow him to trifle consciously with other lives. Work must also have been
his safeguard when the habit of it had been acquired, and when
imagination, once his master, had learned to serve him.

One tangible cause of his youthful restlessness has been implied in the
foregoing remarks, but deserves stating in his sister’s words: ‘The fact
was, poor boy, he had outgrown his social surroundings. They were
absolutely good, but they were narrow; it could not be otherwise; he
chafed under them.’ He was not, however, quite without congenial society
even before the turning-point in his outward existence which was reached
in the publication of ‘Pauline’; and one long friendly acquaintance,
together with one lasting friendship, had their roots in these early
Camberwell days. The families of Joseph Arnould and Alfred Domett both
lived at Camberwell. These two young men were bred to the legal
profession, and the former, afterwards Sir Joseph Arnould, became a judge
in Bombay. But the father of Alfred Domett had been one of Nelson’s
captains, and the roving sailor spirit was apparent in his son; for he had
scarcely been called to the Bar when he started for New Zealand on the
instance of a cousin who had preceded him, but who was drowned in the
course of a day’s surveying before he could arrive. He became a member of
the New Zealand Parliament, and ultimately, for a short time, of its
Cabinet; only returning to England after an absence of thirty years. This
Mr. Domett seems to have been a very modest man, besides a devoted friend
of Robert Browning’s, and on occasion a warm defender of his works. When
he read the apostrophe to ‘Alfred, dear friend,’ in the ‘Guardian Angel’,
he had reached the last line before it occurred to him that the person
invoked could be he. I do not think that this poem, and that directly
addressed to him under the pseudonym of ‘Waring’, were the only ones
inspired by the affectionate remembrance which he had left in their
author’s mind.

Among his boy companions were also the three Silverthornes, his neighbours
at Camberwell, and cousins on the maternal side. They appear to have been
wild youths, and had certainly no part in his intellectual or literary
life; but the group is interesting to his biographer. The three brothers
were all gifted musicians; having also, probably, received this endowment
from their mother’s father. Mr. Browning conceived a great affection for
the eldest, and on the whole most talented of the cousins; and when he had
died—young, as they all did—he wrote ‘May and Death’ in
remembrance of him. The name of ‘Charles’ stands there for the old,
familiar ‘Jim’, so often uttered by him in half-pitying, and
all-affectionate allusion, in his later years. Mrs. Silverthorne was the
aunt who paid for the printing of ‘Pauline’.

It was at about the time of his short attendance at University College
that the choice of poetry as his future profession was formally made. It
was a foregone conclusion in the young Robert’s mind; and little less in
that of his father, who took too sympathetic an interest in his son’s life
not to have seen in what direction his desires were tending. He must, it
is true, at some time or other, have played with the thought of becoming
an artist; but the thought can never have represented a wish. If he had
entertained such a one, it would have met not only with no opposition on
his father’s part, but with a very ready assent, nor does the question
ever seem to have been seriously mooted in the family councils. It would
be strange, perhaps, if it had. Mr. Browning became very early familiar
with the names of the great painters, and also learned something about
their work; for the Dulwich Gallery was within a pleasant walk of his
home, and his father constantly took him there. He retained through life a
deep interest in art and artists, and became a very familiar figure in one
or two London studios. Some drawings made by him from the nude, in Italy,
and for which he had prepared himself by assiduous copying of casts and
study of human anatomy, had, I believe, great merit. But painting was one
of the subjects in which he never received instruction, though he
modelled, under the direction of his friend Mr. Story; and a letter of his
own will presently show that, in his youth at least, he never credited
himself with exceptional artistic power. That he might have become an
artist, and perhaps a great one, is difficult to doubt, in the face of his
brilliant general ability and special gifts. The power to do a thing is,
however, distinct from the impulse to do it, and proved so in the present
case.

More importance may be given to an idea of his father’s that he should
qualify himself for the Bar. It would naturally coincide with the widening
of the social horizon which his University College classes supplied; it
was possibly suggested by the fact that the closest friends he had already
made, and others whom he was perhaps now making, were barristers. But this
also remained an idea. He might have been placed in the Bank of England,
where the virtual offer of an appointment had been made to him through his
father; but the elder Browning spontaneously rejected this, as unworthy of
his son’s powers. He had never, he said, liked bank work himself, and
could not, therefore, impose it on him.

We have still to notice another, and a more mistaken view of the
possibilities of Mr. Browning’s life. It has been recently stated,
doubtless on the authority of some words of his own, that the Church was a
profession to which he once felt himself drawn. But an admission of this
kind could only refer to that period of his childhood when natural
impulse, combined with his mother’s teaching and guidance, frequently
caused his fancy and his feelings to assume a religious form. From the
time when he was a free agent he ceased to be even a regular churchgoer,
though religion became more, rather than less, an integral part of his
inner life; and his alleged fondness for a variety of preachers meant
really that he only listened to those who, from personal association or
conspicuous merit, were interesting to him. I have mentioned Canon Melvill
as one of these; the Rev. Thomas Jones was, as will be seen, another. In
Venice he constantly, with his sister, joined the congregation of an
Italian minister of the little Vaudois church there.*

It would be far less surprising if we were told, on sufficient authority,
that he had been disturbed by hankerings for the stage. He was a
passionate admirer of good acting, and would walk from London to Richmond
and back again to see Edmund Kean when he was performing there. We know
how Macready impressed him, though the finer genius of Kean became very
apparent to his retrospective judgment of the two; and it was impossible
to see or hear him, as even an old man, in some momentary personation of
one of Shakespeare’s characters, above all of Richard III., and not feel
that a great actor had been lost in him.

So few professions were thought open to gentlemen in Robert Browning’s
eighteenth year, that his father’s acquiescence in that which he had
chosen might seem a matter scarcely less of necessity than of kindness.
But we must seek the kindness not only in this first, almost inevitable,
assent to his son’s becoming a writer, but in the subsequent unfailing
readiness to support him in his literary career. ‘Paracelsus’, ‘Sordello’,
and the whole of ‘Bells and Pomegranates’ were published at his father’s
expense, and, incredible as it appears, brought no return to him. This was
vividly present to Mr. Browning’s mind in what Mrs. Kemble so justly
defines as those ‘remembering days’ which are the natural prelude to the
forgetting ones. He declared, in the course of these, to a friend, that
for it alone he owed more to his father than to anyone else in the world.
Words to this effect, spoken in conversation with his sister, have since,
as it was right they should, found their way into print. The more justly
will the world interpret any incidental admission he may ever have made,
of intellectual disagreement between that father and himself.

When the die was cast, and young Browning was definitely to adopt
literature as his profession, he qualified himself for it by reading and
digesting the whole of Johnson’s Dictionary. We cannot be surprised to
hear this of one who displayed so great a mastery of words, and so deep a
knowledge of the capacities of the English language.

Chapter 5

1833-1835

‘Pauline’—Letters to Mr. Fox—Publication of the Poem; chief
Biographical and Literary Characteristics—Mr. Fox’s Review in the
‘Monthly Repository’; other Notices—Russian Journey—Desired
diplomatic Appointment—Minor Poems; first Sonnet; their Mode of
Appearance—’The Trifler’—M. de Ripert-Monclar—’Paracelsus’—Letters
to Mr. Fox concerning it; its Publication—Incidental Origin of
‘Paracelsus’; its inspiring Motive; its Relation to ‘Pauline’—Mr.
Fox’s Review of it in the ‘Monthly Repository’—Article in the
‘Examiner’ by John Forster.

Before Mr. Browning had half completed his twenty-first year he had
written ‘Pauline, a Fragment of a Confession’. His sister was in the
secret, but this time his parents were not. This is why his aunt, hearing
that ‘Robert’ had ‘written a poem,’ volunteered the sum requisite for its
publication. Even this first instalment of success did not inspire much
hope in the family mind, and Miss Browning made pencil copies of her
favourite passages for the event, which seemed only too possible, of her
never seeing the whole poem again. It was, however, accepted by Saunders
and Otley, and appeared anonymously in 1833. Meanwhile the young author
had bethought himself of his early sympathizer, Mr. Fox, and he wrote to
him as follows (the letter is undated):

Dear Sir,—Perhaps by the aid of the subjoined initials and a little
reflection, you may recollect an oddish sort of boy, who had the honour of
being introduced to you at Hackney some years back—at that time a
sayer of verse and a doer of it, and whose doings you had a little
previously commended after a fashion—(whether in earnest or not God
knows): that individual it is who takes the liberty of addressing one
whose slight commendation then, was more thought of than all the gun drum
and trumpet of praise would be now, and to submit to you a free and easy
sort of thing which he wrote some months ago ‘on one leg’ and which comes
out this week—having either heard or dreamed that you contribute to
the ‘Westminster’.

Should it be found too insignificant for cutting up, I shall no less
remain, Dear sir, Your most obedient servant, R. B.

I have forgotten the main thing—which is to beg you not to spoil a
loophole I have kept for backing out of the thing if necessary, ‘sympathy
of dear friends,’ &c. &c., none of whom know anything about it.

Monday Morning; Rev.—Fox.

The answer was clearly encouraging, and Mr. Browning wrote again:

Dear Sir,—In consequence of your kind permission I send, or will
send, a dozen copies of ‘Pauline’ and (to mitigate the infliction)
Shelley’s Poem—on account of what you mentioned this morning. It
will perhaps be as well that you let me know their safe arrival by a line
to R. B. junior, Hanover Cottage, Southampton Street, Camberwell. You must
not think me too encroaching, if I make the getting back ‘Rosalind and
Helen’ an excuse for calling on you some evening—the said ‘R. and
H.’ has, I observe, been well thumbed and sedulously marked by an
acquaintance of mine, but I have not time to rub out his labour of love. I
am, dear sir, Yours very really, R. Browning. Camberwell: 2 o’clock.

At the left-hand corner of the first page of this note is written: ‘The
parcel—a “Pauline” parcel—is come. I send one as a witness.’

On the inner page is written:

‘Impromptu on hearing a sermon by the Rev. T. R.—pronounced “heavy”—

‘A heavy sermon!—sure the error’s great, For not a word Tom
uttered had its weight.’

A third letter, also undated, but post-marked March 29, 1833, refers
probably to the promise or announcement of a favourable notice. A fourth
conveys Mr. Browning’s thanks for the notice itself:

My dear Sir,—I have just received your letter, which I am desirous
of acknowledging before any further mark of your kindness reaches me;—I
can only offer you my simple thanks—but they are of the sort that
one can give only once or twice in a life: all things considered, I think
you are almost repaid, if you imagine what I must feel—and it will
have been worth while to have made a fool of myself, only to have obtained
a ‘case’ which leaves my fine fellow Mandeville at a dead lock.

As for the book—I hope ere long to better it, and to deserve your
goodness.

In the meantime I shall not forget the extent to which I am, dear sir,
Your most obliged and obedient servant R. B. S. & O.’s, Conduit St.,
Thursday m-g.

I must intrude on your attention, my dear sir, once more than I had
intended—but a notice like the one I have read will have its effect
at all hazards.

I can only say that I am very proud to feel as grateful as I do, and not
altogether hopeless of justifying, by effort at least, your most generous
‘coming forward’. Hazlitt wrote his essays, as he somewhere tells us,
mainly to send them to some one in the country who had ‘always prophesied
he would be something’!—I shall never write a line without thinking
of the source of my first praise, be assured. I am, dear sir, Yours most
truly and obliged, Robert Browning. March 31, 1833.

Mr. Fox was then editor of a periodical called the ‘Monthly Repository’,
which, as his daughter, Mrs. Bridell-Fox, writes in her graceful article
on Robert Browning, in the ‘Argosy’ for February 1890, he was endeavouring
to raise from its original denominational character into a first-class
literary and political journal. The articles comprised in the volume for
1833 are certainly full of interest and variety, at once more popular and
more solid than those prescribed by the present fashion of monthly
magazines. He reviewed ‘Pauline’ favourably in its April number—that
is, as soon as it had appeared; and the young poet thus received from him
an introduction to what should have been, though it probably was not, a
large circle of intelligent readers.

The poem was characterized by its author, five years later, in a fantastic
note appended to a copy of it, as ‘the only remaining crab of the shapely
Tree of Life in my Fool’s Paradise.’ This name is ill bestowed upon a work
which, however wild a fruit of Mr. Browning’s genius, contains, in its
many lines of exquisite fancy and deep pathos, so much that is rich and
sweet. It had also, to discard metaphor, its faults of exaggeration and
confusion; and it is of these that Mr. Browning was probably thinking when
he wrote his more serious apologetic preface to its reprint in 1868. But
these faults were partly due to his conception of the character which he
had tried to depict; and partly to the inherent difficulty of depicting
one so complex, in a succession of mental and moral states, irrespectively
of the conditions of time, place, and circumstance which were involved in
them. Only a very powerful imagination could have inspired such an
attempt. A still more conspicuous effort of creative genius reveals itself
at its close. The moment chosen for the ‘Confession’ has been that of a
supreme moral or physical crisis. The exhaustion attendant on this is
directly expressed by the person who makes it, and may also be recognized
in the vivid, yet confusing, intensity of the reminiscences of which it
consists. But we are left in complete doubt as to whether the crisis is
that of approaching death or incipient convalescence, or which character
it bears in the sufferer’s mind; and the language used in the closing
pages is such as to suggest, without the slightest break in poetic
continuity, alternately the one conclusion and the other. This was
intended by Browning to assist his anonymity; and when the writer in
‘Tait’s Magazine’ spoke of the poem as a piece of pure bewilderment, he
expressed the natural judgment of the Philistine, while proving himself
such. If the notice by J. S. Mill, which this criticism excluded, was
indeed—as Mr. Browning always believed—much more sympathetic,
I can only record my astonishment; for there never was a large and
cultivated intelligence one can imagine less in harmony than his with the
poetic excesses, or even the poetic qualities, of ‘Pauline’. But this is a
digression.

Mr. Fox, though an accomplished critic, made very light of the artistic
blemishes of the work. His admiration for it was as generous as it was
genuine; and, having recognized in it the hand of a rising poet, it was
more congenial to him to hail that poet’s advent than to register his
shortcomings.

‘The poem,’ he says, ‘though evidently a hasty and imperfect sketch, has
truth and life in it, which gave us the thrill, and laid hold of us with
the power, the sensation of which has never yet failed us as a test of
genius.’

But it had also, in his mind, a distinguishing characteristic, which
raised it above the sphere of merely artistic criticism. The article
continues:

‘We have never read anything more purely confessional. The whole
composition is of the spirit, spiritual. The scenery is in the chambers of
thought; the agencies are powers and passions; the events are transitions
from one state of spiritual existence to another.’

And we learn from the context that he accepted this confessional and
introspective quality as an expression of the highest emotional life—of
the essence, therefore, of religion. On this point the sincerest admirers
of the poem may find themselves at issue with Mr. Fox. Its sentiment is
warmly religious; it is always, in a certain sense, spiritual; but its
intellectual activities are exercised on entirely temporal ground, and
this fact would generally be admitted as the negation of spirituality in
the religious sense of the word. No difference, however, of opinion as to
his judgment of ‘Pauline’ can lessen our appreciation of Mr. Fox’s
encouraging kindness to its author. No one who loved Mr. Browning in
himself, or in his work, can read the last lines of this review without a
throb of affectionate gratitude for the sympathy so ungrudgingly, and—as
he wrote during his latest years—so opportunely given:

‘In recognizing a poet we cannot stand upon trifles nor fret ourselves
about such matters [as a few blemishes]. Time enough for that afterwards,
when larger works come before us. Archimedes in the bath had many
particulars to settle about specific gravities and Hiero’s crown, but he
first gave a glorious leap and shouted ‘Eureka!”

Many persons have discovered Mr. Browning since he has been known to fame.
One only discovered him in his obscurity.

Next to that of Mr. Fox stands the name of John Forster among the first
spontaneous appreciators of Mr. Browning’s genius; and his admiration was,
in its own way, the more valuable for the circumstances which precluded in
it all possible, even unconscious, bias of personal interest or sympathy.
But this belongs to a somewhat later period of our history.

I am dwelling at some length on this first experience of Mr. Browning’s
literary career, because the confidence which it gave him determined its
immediate future, if not its ultimate course—because, also, the poem
itself is more important to the understanding of his mind than perhaps any
other of his isolated works. It was the earliest of his dramatic
creations; it was therefore inevitably the most instinct with himself; and
we may regard the ‘Confession’ as to a great extent his own, without for
an instant ignoring the imaginative element which necessarily and
certainly entered into it. At one moment, indeed, his utterance is so
emphatic that we should feel it to be direct, even if we did not know it
to be true. The passage beginning, ‘I am made up of an intensest life,’
conveys something more than the writer’s actual psychological state. The
feverish desire of life became gradually modified into a more or less
active intellectual and imaginative curiosity; but the sense of an
individual, self-centred, and, as it presented itself to him,
unconditioned existence, survived all the teachings of experience, and
often indeed unconsciously imposed itself upon them.

I have already alluded to that other and more pathetic fragment of
distinct autobiography which is to be found in the invocation to the
‘Sun-treader’. Mr. Fox, who has quoted great part of it, justly declares
that ‘the fervency, the remembrance, the half-regret mingling with its
exultation, are as true as its leading image is beautiful.’ The
‘exultation’ is in the triumph of Shelley’s rising fame; the regret, for
the lost privilege of worshipping in solitary tenderness at an obscure
shrine. The double mood would have been characteristic of any period of
Mr. Browning’s life.

The artistic influence of Shelley is also discernible in the natural
imagery of the poem, which reflects a fitful and emotional fancy instead
of the direct poetic vision of the author’s later work.

‘Pauline’ received another and graceful tribute two months later than the
review. In an article of the ‘Monthly Repository’, and in the course of a
description of some luxuriant wood-scenery, the following passage occurs:

‘Shelley and Tennyson are the best books for this place. . . . They are
natives of this soil; literally so; and if planted would grow as surely as
a crowbar in Kentucky sprouts tenpenny nails. ‘Probatum est.’ Last autumn
L——dropped a poem of Shelley’s down there in the wood,*
amongst the thick, damp, rotting leaves, and this spring some one found a
delicate exotic-looking plant, growing wild on the very spot, with
‘Pauline’ hanging from its slender stalk. Unripe fruit it may be, but of
pleasant flavour and promise, and a mellower produce, it may be hoped,
will follow.’

The anonymity of the poem was not long preserved; there was no reason why
it should be. But ‘Pauline’ was, from the first, little known or discussed
beyond the immediate circle of the poet’s friends; and when, twenty years
later, Dante Gabriel Rossetti unexpectedly came upon it in the library of
the British Museum, he could only surmise that it had been written by the
author of ‘Paracelsus’.

The only recorded event of the next two years was Mr. Browning’s visit to
Russia, which took place in the winter of 1833-4. The Russian
consul-general, Mr. Benckhausen, had taken a great liking to him, and
being sent to St. Petersburg on some special mission, proposed that he
should accompany him, nominally in the character of secretary. The letters
written to his sister during this, as during every other absence, were
full of graphic description, and would have been a mine of interest for
the student of his imaginative life. They are, unfortunately, all
destroyed, and we have only scattered reminiscences of what they had to
tell; but we know how strangely he was impressed by some of the
circumstances of the journey: above all, by the endless monotony of
snow-covered pine-forest, through which he and his companion rushed for
days and nights at the speed of six post-horses, without seeming to move
from one spot. He enjoyed the society of St. Petersburg, and was fortunate
enough, before his return, to witness the breaking-up of the ice on the
Neva, and see the Czar perform the yearly ceremony of drinking the first
glass of water from it. He was absent about three months.

The one active career which would have recommended itself to him in his
earlier youth was diplomacy; it was that which he subsequently desired for
his son. He would indeed not have been averse to any post of activity and
responsibility not unsuited to the training of a gentleman. Soon after his
return from Russia he applied for appointment on a mission which was to be
despatched to Persia; and the careless wording of the answer which his
application received made him think for a moment that it had been granted.
He was much disappointed when he learned, through an interview with the
‘chief’, that the place was otherwise filled.

In 1834 he began a little series of contributions to the ‘Monthly
Repository’, extending into 1835-6, and consisting of five poems. The
earliest of these was a sonnet, not contained in any edition of Mr.
Browning’s works, and which, I believe, first reappeared in Mr. Gosse’s
article in the ‘Century Magazine’, December 1881; now part of his
‘Personalia’. The second, beginning ‘A king lived long ago’, was to be
published, with alterations and additions, as one of ‘Pippa’s’ songs.
‘Porphyria’s Lover’ and ‘Johannes Agricola in Meditation’ were reprinted
together in ‘Bells and Pomegranates’ under the heading of ‘Madhouse
Cells’. The fifth consisted of the Lines beginning ‘Still ailing, Wind?
wilt be appeased or no?’ afterwards introduced into the sixth section of
‘James Lee’s Wife’. The sonnet is not very striking, though hints of the
poet’s future psychological subtlety are not wanting in it; but his most
essential dramatic quality reveals itself in the last three poems.

This winter of 1834-5 witnessed the birth, perhaps also the extinction, of
an amateur periodical, established by some of Mr. Browning’s friends;
foremost among these the young Dowsons, afterwards connected with Alfred
Domett. The magazine was called the ‘Trifler’, and published in monthly
numbers of about ten pages each. It collapsed from lack of pocket-money on
the part of the editors; but Mr. Browning had written for it one letter,
February 1833, signed with his usual initial Z, and entitled ‘Some
strictures on a late article in the ‘Trifler’.’ This boyish production
sparkles with fun, while affecting the lengthy quaintnesses of some
obsolete modes of speech. The article which it attacks was ‘A Dissertation
on Debt and Debtors’, where the subject was, I imagine, treated in the
orthodox way: and he expends all his paradox in showing that indebtedness
is a necessary condition of human life, and all his sophistry in confusing
it with the abstract sense of obligation. It is, perhaps, scarcely fair to
call attention to such a mere argumentative and literary freak; but there
is something so comical in a defence of debt, however transparent,
proceeding from a man to whom never in his life a bill can have been sent
in twice, and who would always have preferred ready-money payment to
receiving a bill at all, that I may be forgiven for quoting some passages
from it.

For to be man is to be a debtor:—hinting but slightly at the grand
and primeval debt implied in the idea of a creation, as matter too hard
for ears like thine, (for saith not Luther, What hath a cow to do with
nutmegs?) I must, nevertheless, remind thee that all moralists have
concurred in considering this our mortal sojourn as indeed an
uninterrupted state of debt, and the world our dwelling-place as
represented by nothing so aptly as by an inn, wherein those who lodge most
commodiously have in perspective a proportionate score to reduce,* and
those who fare least delicately, but an insignificant shot to discharge—or,
as the tuneful Quarles well phraseth it—

So far, therefore, from these sagacious ethics holding that

as thou pratest, ’tis plain that they have willed on the very outset to
inculcate this truth on the mind of every man,—no barren and
inconsequential dogma, but an effectual, ever influencing and productive
rule of life,—that he is born a debtor, lives a debtor—aye,
friend, and when thou diest, will not some judicious bystander,—no
recreant as thou to the bonds of nature, but a good borrower and true—remark,
as did his grandsire before him on like occasions, that thou hast ‘paid
the debt of nature’? Ha! I have thee ‘beyond the rules’, as one (a
bailiff) may say!

Such performances supplied a distraction to the more serious work of
writing ‘Paracelsus’, which was to be concluded in March 1835, and which
occupied the foregoing winter months. We do not know to what extent Mr.
Browning had remained in communication with Mr. Fox; but the following
letters show that the friend of ‘Pauline’ gave ready and efficient help in
the strangely difficult task of securing a publisher for the new poem.

The first is dated April 2, 1835.

Dear Sir,—I beg to acknowledge the receipt of your letter:—Sardanapalus
‘could not go on multiplying kingdoms’—nor I protestations—but
I thank you very much.

You will oblige me indeed by forwarding the introduction to Moxon. I
merely suggested him in particular, on account of his good name and fame
among author-folk, besides he has himself written—as the Americans
say—’more poetry ‘an you can shake a stick at.’ So I hope we shall
come to terms.

I also hope my poem will turn out not utterly unworthy your kind interest,
and more deserving your favour than anything of mine you have as yet seen;
indeed I all along proposed to myself such an endeavour, for it will never
do for one so distinguished by past praise to prove nobody after all—’nous
verrons’. I am, dear sir, Yours most truly and obliged Robt. Browning.

On April 16 he wrote again as follows:

Dear Sir,

Your communication gladdened the cockles of my heart. I lost no time in
presenting myself to Moxon, but no sooner was Mr. Clarke’s letter perused
than the Moxonian visage loured exceedingly thereat—the Moxonian
accent grew dolorous thereupon:—’Artevelde’ has not paid expenses by
about thirty odd pounds. Tennyson’s poetry is ‘popular at Cambridge’, and
yet of 800 copies which were printed of his last, some 300 only have gone
off: Mr. M. hardly knows whether he shall ever venture again, &c.
&c., and in short begs to decline even inspecting, &c. &c.

I called on Saunders and Otley at once, and, marvel of marvels, do really
think there is some chance of our coming to decent terms—I shall
know at the beginning of next week, but am not over-sanguine.

You will ‘sarve me out’? two words to that; being the man you are, you
must need very little telling from me, of the real feeling I have of your
criticism’s worth, and if I have had no more of it, surely I am hardly to
blame, who have in more than one instance bored you sufficiently: but not
a particle of your article has been rejected or neglected by your
observant humble servant, and very proud shall I be if my new work bear in
it the marks of the influence under which it was undertaken—and if I
prove not a fit compeer of the potter in Horace who anticipated an amphora
and produced a porridge-pot. I purposely keep back the subject until you
see my conception of its capabilities—otherwise you would be
planning a vase fit to give the go-by to Evander’s best crockery, which my
cantharus would cut but a sorry figure beside—hardly up to the ansa.

But such as it is, it is very earnest and suggestive—and likely I
hope to do good; and though I am rather scared at the thought of a fresh
eye going over its 4,000 lines—discovering blemishes of all
sorts which my one wit cannot avail to detect, fools treated as sages,
obscure passages, slipshod verses, and much that worse is,—yet on
the whole I am not much afraid of the issue, and I would give something to
be allowed to read it some morning to you—for every rap o’ the
knuckles I should get a clap o’ the back, I know.

I have another affair on hand, rather of a more popular nature, I
conceive, but not so decisive and explicit on a point or two—so I
decide on trying the question with this:—I really shall need
your notice, on this account; I shall affix my name and stick my arms
akimbo; there are a few precious bold bits here and there, and the drift
and scope are awfully radical—I am ‘off’ for ever with the other
side, but must by all means be ‘on’ with yours—a position once
gained, worthier works shall follow—therefore a certain writer* who
meditated a notice (it matters not laudatory or otherwise) on ‘Pauline’ in
the ‘Examiner’, must be benignant or supercilious as he shall choose, but
in no case an idle spectator of my first appearance on any stage (having
previously only dabbled in private theatricals) and bawl ‘Hats off!’ ‘Down
in front!’ &c., as soon as I get to the proscenium; and he may depend
that tho’ my ‘Now is the winter of our discontent’ be rather awkward, yet
there shall be occasional outbreaks of good stuff—that I shall warm
as I get on, and finally wish ‘Richmond at the bottom of the seas,’ &c.
in the best style imaginable.

Excuse all this swagger, I know you will, and

(The signature has been cut off; evidently for an autograph.)

Mr. Effingham Wilson was induced to publish the poem, but more, we
understand, on the ground of radical sympathies in Mr. Fox and the author
than on that of its intrinsic worth.

The title-page of ‘Paracelsus’ introduces us to one of the warmest
friendships of Mr. Browning’s life. Count de Ripert-Monclar was a young
French Royalist, one of those who had accompanied the Duchesse de Berri on
her Chouan expedition, and was then, for a few years, spending his summers
in England; ostensibly for his pleasure, really—as he confessed to
the Browning family—in the character of private agent of
communication between the royal exiles and their friends in France. He was
four years older than the poet, and of intellectual tastes which created
an immediate bond of union between them. In the course of one of their
conversations, he suggested the life of Paracelsus as a possible subject
for a poem; but on second thoughts pronounced it unsuitable, because it
gave no room for the introduction of love: about which, he added, every
young man of their age thought he had something quite new to say. Mr.
Browning decided, after the necessary study, that he would write a poem on
Paracelsus, but treating him in his own way. It was dedicated, in
fulfilment of a promise, to the friend to whom its inspiration had been
due.

The Count’s visits to England entirely ceased, and the two friends did not
meet for twenty years. Then, one day, in a street in Rome, Mr. Browning
heard a voice behind him crying, ‘Robert!’ He turned, and there was
‘Amedee’. Both were, by that time, married; the Count—then, I
believe, Marquis—to an English lady, Miss Jerningham. Mrs. Browning,
to whom of course he was introduced, liked him very much.*

Mr. Browning did treat Paracelsus in his own way; and in so doing produced
a character—at all events a history—which, according to recent
judgments, approached far nearer to the reality than any conception which
had until then been formed of it. He had carefully collected all the known
facts of the great discoverer’s life, and interpreted them with a sympathy
which was no less an intuition of their truth than a reflection of his own
genius upon them. We are enabled in some measure to judge of this by a
paper entitled ‘Paracelsus, the Reformer of Medicine’, written by Dr.
Edward Berdoe for the Browning Society, and read at its October meeting in
1888; and in the difficulty which exists for most of us of verifying the
historical data of Mr. Browning’s poem, it becomes a valuable guide to, as
well as an interesting comment upon it.

Dr. Berdoe reminds us that we cannot understand the real Paracelsus
without reference to the occult sciences so largely cultivated in his day,
as also to the mental atmosphere which produced them; and he quotes in
illustration a passage from the writings of that Bishop of Spanheim who
was the instructor of Paracelsus, and who appears as such in the poem. The
passage is a definition of divine magic, which is apparently another term
for alchemy; and lays down the great doctrine of all mediaeval occultism,
as of all modern theosophy—of a soul-power equally operative in the
material and the immaterial, in nature and in the consciousness of man.

The same clue will guide us, as no other can, through what is apparently
conflicting in the aims and methods, anomalous in the moral experience, of
the Paracelsus of the poem. His feverish pursuit, among the things of
Nature, of an ultimate of knowledge, not contained, even in fragments, in
her isolated truths; the sense of failure which haunts his most valuable
attainments; his tampering with the lower or diabolic magic, when the
divine has failed; the ascetic exaltation in which he begins his career;
the sudden awakening to the spiritual sterility which has been consequent
on it; all these find their place, if not always their counterpart, in the
real life.

The language of Mr. Browning’s Paracelsus, his attitude towards himself
and the world, are not, however, quite consonant with the alleged facts.
They are more appropriate to an ardent explorer of the world of abstract
thought than to a mystical scientist pursuing the secret of existence. He
preserves, in all his mental vicissitudes, a loftiness of tone and a unity
of intention, difficult to connect, even in fancy, with the real man, in
whom the inherited superstitions and the prognostics of true science must
often have clashed with each other. Dr. Berdoe’s picture of the ‘Reformer’
drawn more directly from history, conveys this double impression. Mr.
Browning has rendered him more simple by, as it were, recasting him in the
atmosphere of a more modern time, and of his own intellectual life. This
poem still, therefore, belongs to the same group as ‘Pauline’, though, as
an effort of dramatic creation, superior to it.

We find the Poet with still less of dramatic disguise in the deathbed
revelation which forms so beautiful a close to the story. It supplies a
fitter comment to the errors of the dramatic Paracelsus, than to those of
the historical, whether or not its utterance was within the compass of
historical probability, as Dr. Berdoe believes. In any case it was the
direct product of Mr. Browning’s mind, and expressed what was to be his
permanent conviction. It might then have been an echo of German
pantheistic philosophies. From the point of view of science—of
modern science at least—it was prophetic; although the prophecy of
one for whom evolution could never mean less or more than a divine
creation operating on this progressive plan.

The more striking, perhaps, for its personal quality are the evidences of
imaginative sympathy, even direct human insight, in which the poem
abounds. Festus is, indeed, an essentially human creature: the man—it
might have been the woman—of unambitious intellect and large
intelligence of the heart, in whom so many among us have found comfort and
help. We often feel, in reading ‘Pauline’, that the poet in it was older
than the man. The impression is more strongly and more definitely conveyed
by this second work, which has none of the intellectual crudeness of
‘Pauline’, though it still belongs to an early phase of the author’s
intellectual life. Not only its mental, but its moral maturity, seems so
much in advance of his uncompleted twenty-third year.

To the first edition of ‘Paracelsus’ was affixed a preface, now long
discarded, but which acquires fresh interest in a retrospect of the
author’s completed work; for it lays down the constant principle of
dramatic creation by which that work was to be inspired. It also
anticipates probable criticism of the artistic form which on this, and so
many subsequent occasions, he selected for it.

‘I am anxious that the reader should not, at the very outset—mistaking
my performance for one of a class with which it has nothing in common—judge
it by principles on which it was never moulded, and subject it to a
standard to which it was never meant to conform. I therefore anticipate
his discovery, that it is an attempt, probably more novel than happy, to
reverse the method usually adopted by writers whose aim it is to set forth
any phenomenon of the mind or the passions, by the operation of persons
and events; and that, instead of having recourse 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 Browning—Visitors at Hatcham—Thomas Carlyle—Social
Life—New Friends and Acquaintance—Introduction to Macready—New
Year’s Eve at Elm Place—Introduction to John Forster—Miss
Fanny Haworth—Miss Martineau—Serjeant Talfourd—The ‘Ion’
Supper—’Strafford’—Relations with Macready—Performance
of ‘Strafford’—Letters concerning it from Mr. Browning and Miss
Flower—Personal Glimpses of Robert Browning—Rival Forms of
Dramatic Inspiration—Relation of ‘Strafford’ to ‘Sordello’—Mr.
Robertson and the ‘Westminster Review’.

It was soon after this time, though the exact date cannot be recalled,
that the Browning family moved from Camberwell to Hatcham. Some such
change had long been in contemplation, for their house was now too small;
and the finding one more suitable, in the latter place, had decided the
question. The new home possessed great attractions. The long, low rooms of
its upper storey supplied abundant accommodation for the elder Mr.
Browning’s six thousand books. Mrs. Browning was suffering greatly from
her chronic ailment, neuralgia; and the large garden, opening on to the
Surrey hills, promised her all the benefits of country air. There were a
coach-house and stable, which, by a curious, probably old-fashioned,
arrangement, formed part of the house, and were accessible from it. Here
the ‘good horse’, York, was eventually put up; and near this, in the
garden, the poet soon had another though humbler friend in the person of a
toad, which became so much attached to him that it would follow him as he
walked. He visited it daily, where it burrowed under a white rose tree,
announcing himself by a pinch of gravel dropped into its hole; and the
creature would crawl forth, allow its head to be gently tickled, and
reward the act with that loving glance of the soft full eyes which Mr.
Browning has recalled in one of the poems of ‘Asolando’.

This change of residence brought the grandfather’s second family, for the
first time, into close as well as friendly contact with the first. Mr.
Browning had always remained on outwardly friendly terms with his
stepmother; and both he and his children were rewarded for this
forbearance by the cordial relations which grew up between themselves and
two of her sons. But in the earlier days they lived too far apart for
frequent meeting. The old Mrs. Browning was now a widow, and, in order to
be near her relations, she also came to Hatcham, and established herself
there in close neighbourhood to them. She had then with her only a son and
a daughter, those known to the poet’s friends as Uncle Reuben and Aunt
Jemima; respectively nine years, and one year, older than he. ‘Aunt
Jemima’ married not long afterwards, and is chiefly remembered as having
been very amiable, and, in early youth, to use her nephew’s words, ‘as
beautiful as the day;’ but kindly, merry ‘Uncle Reuben’, then clerk in the
Rothschilds’ London bank,* became a conspicuous member of the family
circle. This does not mean that the poet was ever indebted to him for
pecuniary help; and it is desirable that this should be understood, since
it has been confidently asserted that he was so. So long as he was
dependent at all, he depended exclusively on his father. Even the use of
his uncle’s horse, which might have been accepted as a friendly concession
on Mr. Reuben’s part, did not really represent one. The animal stood, as I
have said, in Mr. Browning’s stable, and it was groomed by his gardener.
The promise of these conveniences had induced Reuben Browning to buy a
horse instead of continuing to hire one. He could only ride it on a few
days of the week, and it was rather a gain than a loss to him that so good
a horseman as his nephew should exercise it during the interval.

Uncle Reuben was not a great appreciator of poetry—at all events of
his nephew’s; and an irreverent remark on ‘Sordello’, imputed to a more
eminent contemporary, proceeded, under cover of a friend’s name, from him.
But he had his share of mental endowments. We are told that he was a good
linguist, and that he wrote on finance under an assumed name. He was also,
apparently, an accomplished classic. Lord Beaconsfield is said to have
declared that the inscription on a silver inkstand, presented to the
daughter of Lionel Rothschild on her marriage, by the clerks at New Court,
‘was the most appropriate thing he had ever come across;’ and that whoever
had selected it must be one of the first Latin scholars of the day. It was
Mr. Reuben Browning.

Another favourite uncle was William Shergold Browning, though less
intimate with his nephew and niece than he would have become if he had not
married while they were still children, and settled in Paris, where his
father’s interest had placed him in the Rothschild house. He is known by
his ‘History of the Huguenots’, a work, we are told, ‘full of research,
with a reference to contemporary literature for almost every occurrence
mentioned or referred to.’ He also wrote the ‘Provost of Paris’, and ‘Hoel
Morven’, historical novels, and ‘Leisure Hours’, a collection of
miscellanies; and was a contributor for some years to the ‘Gentleman’s
Magazine’. It was chiefly from this uncle that Miss Browning and her
brother heard the now often-repeated stories of their probable ancestors,
Micaiah Browning, who distinguished himself at the siege of Derry, and
that commander of the ship ‘Holy Ghost’ who conveyed Henry V. to France
before the battle of Agincourt, and received the coat-of-arms, with its
emblematic waves, in reward for his service. Robert Browning was also
indebted to him for the acquaintance of M. de Ripert-Monclar; for he was
on friendly terms with the uncle of the young count, the Marquis de
Fortia, a learned man and member of the Institut, and gave a letter of
introduction—actually, I believe, to his brother Reuben—at the
Marquis’s request.*

The friendly relations with Carlyle, which resulted in his high estimate
of the poet’s mother, also began at Hatcham. On one occasion he took his
brother, the doctor, with him to dine there. An earlier and much attached
friend of the family was Captain Pritchard, cousin to the noted physician
Dr. Blundell. He enabled the young Robert, whom he knew from the age of
sixteen, to attend some of Dr. Blundell’s lectures; and this aroused in
him a considerable interest in the sciences connected with medicine,
though, as I shall have occasion to show, no knowledge of either disease
or its treatment ever seems to have penetrated into his life. A Captain
Lloyd is indirectly associated with ‘The Flight of the Duchess’. That poem
was not completed according to its original plan; and it was the always
welcome occurrence of a visit from this gentleman which arrested its
completion. Mr. Browning vividly remembered how the click of the garden
gate, and the sight of the familiar figure advancing towards the house,
had broken in upon his work and dispelled its first inspiration.

The appearance of ‘Paracelsus’ did not give the young poet his just place
in popular judgment and public esteem. A generation was to pass before
this was conceded to him. But it compelled his recognition by the leading
or rising literary men of the day; and a fuller and more varied social
life now opened before him. The names of Serjeant Talfourd, Horne, Leigh
Hunt, Barry Cornwall (Procter), Monckton Milnes (Lord Houghton), Eliot
Warburton, Dickens, Wordsworth, and Walter Savage Landor, represent, with
that of Forster, some of the acquaintances made, or the friendships begun,
at this period. Prominent among the friends that were to be, was also
Archer Gurney, well known in later life as the Rev. Archer Gurney, and
chaplain to the British embassy in Paris. His sympathies were at present
largely absorbed by politics. He was contesting the representation of some
county, on the Conservative side; but he took a very vivid interest in Mr.
Browning’s poems; and this perhaps fixes the beginning of the intimacy at
a somewhat later date; since a pretty story by which it was illustrated
connects itself with the publication of ‘Bells and Pomegranates’. He
himself wrote dramas and poems. Sir John, afterwards Lord, Hanmer was also
much attracted by the young poet, who spent a pleasant week with him at
Bettisfield Park. He was the author of a volume entitled ‘Fra Cipollo and
other Poems’, from which the motto of ‘Colombe’s Birthday’ was
subsequently taken.

The friends, old and new, met in the informal manner of those days, at
afternoon dinners, or later suppers, at the houses of Mr. Fox, Serjeant
Talfourd, and, as we shall see, Mr. Macready; and Mr. Fox’s daughter, then
only a little girl, but intelligent and observant for her years, well
remembers the pleasant gatherings at which she was allowed to assist, when
first performances of plays, or first readings of plays and poems, had
brought some of the younger and more ardent spirits together. Miss Flower,
also, takes her place in the literary group. Her sister had married in
1834, and left her free to live for her own pursuits and her own friends;
and Mr. Browning must have seen more of her then than was possible in his
boyish days.

None, however, of these intimacies were, at the time, so important to him
as that formed with the great actor Macready. They were introduced to each
other by Mr. Fox early in the winter of 1835-6; the meeting is thus
chronicled in Macready’s diary, November 27.*

‘Went from chambers to dine with Rev. William Fox, Bayswater. . . . Mr.
Robert Browning, the author of ‘Paracelsus’, came in after dinner; I was
very much pleased to meet him. His face is full of intelligence. . . . I
took Mr. Browning on, and requested to be allowed to improve my
acquaintance with him. He expressed himself warmly, as gratified by the
proposal, wished to send me his book; we exchanged cards and parted.’

On December 7 he writes:

‘Read ‘Paracelsus’, a work of great daring, starred with poetry of
thought, feeling, and diction, but occasionally obscure; the writer can
scarcely fail to be a leading spirit of his time. . . .’

He invited Mr. Browning to his country house, Elm Place, Elstree, for the
last evening of the year; and again refers to him under date of December
31.

‘. . . Our other guests were Miss Henney, Forster, Cattermole, Browning,
and Mr. Munro. Mr. Browning was very popular with the whole party; his
simple and enthusiastic manner engaged attention, and won opinions from
all present; he looks and speaks more like a youthful poet than any man I
ever saw.’

This New-Year’s-Eve visit brought Browning and Forster together for the
first time. The journey to Elstree was then performed by coach, and the
two young men met at the ‘Blue Posts’, where, with one or more of Mr.
Macready’s other guests, they waited for the coach to start. They eyed
each other with interest, both being striking in their way, and neither
knowing who the other was. When the introduction took place at Macready’s
house, Mr. Forster supplemented it by saying: ‘Did you see a little notice
of you I wrote in the ‘Examiner’?’ The two names will now be constantly
associated in Macready’s diary, which, except for Mr. Browning’s own
casual utterances, is almost our only record of his literary and social
life during the next two years.

It was at Elm Place that Mr. Browning first met Miss Euphrasia Fanny
Haworth, then a neighbour of Mr. Macready, residing with her mother at
Barham Lodge. Miss Haworth was still a young woman, but her love and
talent for art and literature made her a fitting member of the genial
circle to which Mr. Browning belonged; and she and the poet soon became
fast friends. Her first name appears as ‘Eyebright’ in ‘Sordello’. His
letters to her, returned after her death by her brother, Mr. Frederick
Haworth, supply valuable records of his experiences and of his feelings at
one very interesting, and one deeply sorrowful, period of his history. She
was a thoroughly kindly, as well as gifted woman, and much appreciated by
those of the poet’s friends who knew her as a resident in London during
her last years. A portrait which she took of him in 1874 is considered by
some persons very good.

At about this time also, and probably through Miss Haworth, he became
acquainted with Miss Martineau.

Soon after his introduction to Macready, if not before, Mr. Browning
became busy with the thought of writing for the stage. The diary has this
entry for February 16, 1836:

‘Forster and Browning called, and talked over the plot of a tragedy, which
Browning had begun to think of: the subject, Narses. He said that I had bit
him by my performance of Othello, and I told him I hoped I should make the
blood come. It would indeed be some recompense for the miseries, the
humiliations, the heart-sickening disgusts which I have endured in my
profession, if, by its exercise, I had awakened a spirit of poetry whose
influence would elevate, ennoble, and adorn our degraded drama. May it
be!’

But Narses was abandoned, and the more serious inspiration and more
definite motive were to come later. They connect themselves with one of
the pleasant social occurrences which must have lived in the young poet’s
memory. On May 26 ‘Ion’ had been performed for the first time and with
great success, Mr. Macready sustaining the principal part; and the great
actor and a number of their common friends had met at supper at Serjeant
Talfourd’s house to celebrate the occasion. The party included Wordsworth
and Landor, both of whom Mr. Browning then met for the first time. Toasts
flew right and left. Mr. Browning’s health was proposed by Serjeant
Talfourd as that of the youngest poet of England, and Wordsworth responded
to the appeal with very kindly courtesy. The conversation afterwards
turned upon plays, and Macready, who had ignored a half-joking question of
Miss Mitford, whether, if she wrote one, he would act in it, overtook
Browning as they were leaving the house, and said, ‘Write a play,
Browning, and keep me from going to America.’ The reply was, ‘Shall it be
historical and English; what do you say to a drama on Strafford?’

This ready response on the poet’s part showed that Strafford, as a
dramatic subject, had been occupying his thoughts. The subject was in the
air, because Forster was then bringing out a life of that statesman, with
others belonging to the same period. It was more than in the air, so far
as Browning was concerned, because his friend had been disabled, either
through sickness or sorrow, from finishing this volume by the appointed
time, and he, as well he might, had largely helped him in its completion.
It was, however, not till August 3 that Macready wrote in his diary:

‘Forster told me that Browning had fixed on Strafford for the subject of a
tragedy; he could not have hit upon one that I could have more readily
concurred in.’

A previous entry of May 30, the occasion of which is only implied, shows
with how high an estimate of Mr. Browning’s intellectual importance
Macready’s professional relations to him began.

‘Arriving at chambers, I found a note from Browning. What can I say upon
it? It was a tribute which remunerated me for the annoyances and cares of
years: it was one of the very highest, may I not say the highest, honour I
have through life received.’

The estimate maintained itself in reference to the value of Mr. Browning’s
work, since he wrote on March 13, 1837:

‘Read before dinner a few pages of ‘Paracelsus’, which raises my wonder
the more I read it. . . . Looked over two plays, which it was not possible
to read, hardly as I tried. . . . Read some scenes in ‘Strafford’, which
restore one to the world of sense and feeling once again.’

But as the day of the performance drew near, he became at once more
anxious and more critical. An entry of April 28 comments somewhat sharply
on the dramatic faults of ‘Strafford’, besides declaring the writer’s
belief that the only chance for it is in the acting, which, ‘by
possibility, might carry it to the end without disapprobation,’ though he
dares not hope without opposition. It is quite conceivable that his first
complete study of the play, and first rehearsal of it, brought to light
deficiencies which had previously escaped him; but so complete a change of
sentiment points also to private causes of uneasiness and irritation; and,
perhaps, to the knowledge that its being saved by collective good acting
was out of the question.

‘Strafford’ was performed at Covent Garden Theatre on May 1. Mr. Browning
wrote to Mr. Fox after one of the last rehearsals:

May Day, Lincoln’s Inn Fields.

Dear Sir,—All my endeavours to procure a copy before this morning
have been fruitless. I send the first book of the first bundle. Pray
look over it—the alterations to-night will be considerable. The
complexion of the piece is, I grieve to say, ‘perfect gallows’ just now—our
King, Mr. Dale, being . . . but you’ll see him, and, I fear, not
much applaud. Your unworthy son, in things literary, Robert Browning.

P.S. (in pencil).—A most unnecessary desire, but urged on me by
Messrs. Longman: no notice on Str. in to-night’s True Sun,* lest the other
papers be jealous!!!

A second letter, undated, but evidently written a day or two later, refers
to the promised notice, which had then appeared.

Tuesday Night.

No words can express my feelings: I happen to be much annoyed and unwell—but
your most generous notice has almost made ‘my soul well and happy now.’

I thank you, my most kind, most constant friend, from my heart for your
goodness—which is brave enough, just now. I am ever and increasingly
yours, Robert Browning.

You will be glad to see me on the earliest occasion, will you not? I shall
certainly come.

A letter from Miss Flower to Miss Sarah Fox (sister to the Rev. William
Fox), at Norwich, contains the following passage, which evidently
continues a chapter of London news:

‘Then ‘Strafford’; were you not pleased to hear of the success of one you
must, I think, remember a very little boy, years ago. If not, you have
often heard us speak of Robert Browning: and it is a great deal to have
accomplished a successful tragedy, although he seems a good deal annoyed
at the go of things behind the scenes, and declares he will never write a
play again, as long as he lives. You have no idea of the ignorance and
obstinacy of the whole set, with here and there an exception; think of his
having to write out the meaning of the word ‘impeachment’, as some of them
thought it meant ‘poaching’.’

On the first night, indeed, the fate of ‘Strafford’ hung in the balance;
it was saved by Macready and Miss Helen Faucit. After this they must have
been better supported, as it was received on the second night with
enthusiasm by a full house. The catastrophe came after the fifth
performance, with the desertion of the actor who had sustained the part of
Pym. We cannot now judge whether, even under favourable circumstances, the
play would have had as long a run as was intended; but the casting vote in
favour of this view is given by the conduct of Mr. Osbaldistone, the
manager, when it was submitted to him. The diary says, March 30, that he
caught at it with avidity, and agreed to produce it without delay. The
terms he offered to the author must also have been considered favourable
in those days.

The play was published in April by Longman, this time not at the author’s
expense; but it brought no return either to him or to his publisher. It
was dedicated ‘in all affectionate admiration’ to William C. Macready.

We gain some personal glimpses of the Browning of 1835-6; one especially
through Mrs. Bridell-Fox, who thus describes her first meeting with him:

‘I remember . . . when Mr. Browning entered the drawing-room, with a quick
light step; and on hearing from me that my father was out, and in fact
that nobody was at home but myself, he said: “It’s my birthday to-day;
I’ll wait till they come in,” and sitting down to the piano, he added: “If
it won’t disturb you, I’ll play till they do.” And as he turned to the
instrument, the bells of some neighbouring church suddenly burst out with
a frantic merry peal. It seemed, to my childish fancy, as if in response
to the remark that it was his birthday. He was then slim and dark, and
very handsome; and—may I hint it—just a trifle of a dandy,
addicted to lemon-coloured kid-gloves and such things: quite “the glass of
fashion and the mould of form.” But full of ambition, eager for success,
eager for fame, and, what’s more, determined to conquer fame and to
achieve success.’

I do not think his memory ever taxed him with foppishness, though he may
have had the innocent personal vanity of an attractive young man at his
first period of much seeing and being seen; but all we know of him at that
time bears out the impression Mrs. Fox conveys, of a joyous, artless
confidence in himself and in life, easily depressed, but quickly
reasserting itself; and in which the eagerness for new experiences had
freed itself from the rebellious impatience of boyish days. The
self-confidence had its touches of flippancy and conceit; but on this side
it must have been constantly counteracted by his gratitude for kindness,
and by his enthusiastic appreciation of the merits of other men. His
powers of feeling, indeed, greatly expended themselves in this way. He was
very attractive to women and, as we have seen, warmly loved by very
various types of men; but, except in its poetic sense, his emotional
nature was by no means then in the ascendant: a fact difficult to realize
when we remember the passion of his childhood’s love for mother and home,
and the new and deep capabilities of affection to be developed in future
days. The poet’s soul in him was feeling its wings; the realities of life
had not yet begun to weight them.

We see him again at the ‘Ion’ supper, in the grace and modesty with which
he received the honours then adjudged to him. The testimony has been said
to come from Miss Mitford, but may easily have been supplied by Miss
Haworth, who was also present on this occasion.

Mr. Browning’s impulse towards play-writing had not, as we have seen,
begun with ‘Strafford’. It was still very far from being exhausted. And
though he had struck out for himself another line of dramatic activity,
his love for the higher theatrical life, and the legitimate inducements of
the more lucrative and not necessarily less noble form of composition,
might ultimately in some degree have prevailed with him if circumstances
had been such as to educate his theatrical capabilities, and to reward
them. His first acted drama was, however, an interlude to the production
of the important group of poems which was to be completed by ‘Sordello’;
and he alludes to this later work in an also discarded preface to
‘Strafford’, as one on which he had for some time been engaged. He even
characterizes the Tragedy as an attempt ‘to freshen a jaded mind by
diverting it to the healthy natures of a grand epoch.’ ‘Sordello’ again
occupied him during the remainder of 1837 and the beginning of 1838; and
by the spring of this year he must have been thankful to vary the scene
and mode of his labours by means of a first visit to Italy. He announces
his impending journey, with its immediate plan and purpose, in the
following note:

To John Robertson, Esq.

Good Friday, 1838.

Dear Sir,—I was not fortunate enough to find you the day before
yesterday—and must tell you very hurriedly that I sail this morning
for Venice—intending to finish my poem among the scenes it
describes. I shall have your good wishes I know. Believe me, in return,
Dear sir, Yours faithfully and obliged, Robert Browning.

Mr. John Robertson had influence with the ‘Westminster Review’, either as
editor, or member of its staff. He had been introduced to Mr. Browning by
Miss Martineau; and, being a great admirer of ‘Paracelsus’, had promised
careful attention for ‘Sordello’; but, when the time approached, he made
conditions of early reading, &c., which Mr. Browning thought so unfair
towards other magazines that he refused to fulfil them. He lost his
review, and the goodwill of its intending writer; and even Miss Martineau
was ever afterwards cooler towards him, though his attitude in the matter
had been in some degree prompted by a chivalrous partisanship for her.

Chapter 7

1838-1841

First Italian Journey—Letters to Miss Haworth—Mr. John Kenyon—’Sordello’—Letter
to Miss Flower—’Pippa Passes’—’Bells and Pomegranates’.

Mr. Browning sailed from London with Captain Davidson of the ‘Norham
Castle’, a merchant vessel bound for Trieste, on which he found himself
the only passenger. A striking experience of the voyage, and some
characteristic personal details, are given in the following letter to Miss
Haworth. It is dated 1838, and was probably written before that year’s
summer had closed.

Tuesday Evening.

Dear Miss Haworth,—Do look at a fuchsia in full bloom and notice the
clear little honey-drop depending from every flower. I have just found it
out to my no small satisfaction,—a bee’s breakfast. I only answer
for the long-blossomed sort, though,—indeed, for this plant in my
room. Taste and be Titania; you can, that is. All this while I forget that
you will perhaps never guess the good of the discovery: I have, you are to
know, such a love for flowers and leaves—some leaves—that I
every now and then, in an impatience at being able to possess myself of
them thoroughly, to see them quite, satiate myself with their scent,—bite
them to bits—so there will be some sense in that. How I remember the
flowers—even grasses—of places I have seen! Some one flower or
weed, I should say, that gets some strangehow connected with them.

Snowdrops and Tilsit in Prussia go together; cowslips and Windsor Park,
for instance; flowering palm and some place or other in Holland.

Now to answer what can be answered in the letter I was happy to receive
last week. I am quite well. I did not expect you would write,—for
none of your written reasons, however. You will see ‘Sordello’ in a trice,
if the fagging fit holds. I did not write six lines while absent (except a
scene in a play, jotted down as we sailed thro’ the Straits of Gibraltar)—but
I did hammer out some four, two of which are addressed to you, two to the
Queen*—the whole to go in Book III—perhaps. I called you
‘Eyebright’—meaning a simple and sad sort of translation of
“Euphrasia” into my own language: folks would know who Euphrasia, or
Fanny, was—and I should not know Ianthe or Clemanthe. Not that there
is anything in them to care for, good or bad. Shall I say ‘Eyebright’?

I was disappointed in one thing, Canova.

What companions should I have?

The story of the ship must have reached you ‘with a difference’ as Ophelia
says; my sister told it to a Mr. Dow, who delivered it to Forster, I
suppose, who furnished Macready with it, who made it over &c., &c.,
&c.—As short as I can tell, this way it happened: the captain
woke me one bright Sunday morning to say there was a ship floating keel
uppermost half a mile off; they lowered a boat, made ropes fast to some
floating canvas, and towed her towards our vessel. Both met halfway, and
the little air that had risen an hour or two before, sank at once. Our men
made the wreck fast in high glee at having ‘new trousers out of the
sails,’ and quite sure she was a French boat, broken from her moorings at
Algiers, close by. Ropes were next hove (hang this sea-talk!) round her
stanchions, and after a quarter of an hour’s pushing at the capstan, the
vessel righted suddenly, one dead body floating out; five more were in the
forecastle, and had probably been there a month under a blazing African
sun—don’t imagine the wretched state of things. They were, these
six, the ‘watch below’—(I give you the result of the day’s
observation)—the rest, some eight or ten, had been washed overboard
at first. One or two were Algerines, the rest Spaniards. The vessel was a
smuggler bound for Gibraltar; there were two stupidly disproportionate
guns, taking up the whole deck, which was convex and—nay, look you!
(a rough pen-and-ink sketch of the different parts of the wreck is here
introduced) these are the gun-rings, and the black square the place where
the bodies lay. (All the ‘bulwarks’ or sides of the top, carried away by
the waves.) Well, the sailors covered up the hatchway, broke up the
aft-deck, hauled up tobacco and cigars, such heaps of them, and then bale
after bale of prints and chintz, don’t you call it, till the captain was
half-frightened—he would get at the ship’s papers, he said; so these
poor fellows were pulled up, piecemeal, and pitched into the sea, the very
sailors calling to each other to ‘cover the faces’,—no papers of
importance were found, however, but fifteen swords, powder and ball enough
for a dozen such boats, and bundles of cotton, &c., that would have
taken a day to get out, but the captain vowed that after five o’clock she
should be cut adrift: accordingly she was cast loose, not a third of her
cargo having been touched; and you hardly can conceive the strange sight
when the battered hulk turned round, actually, and looked at us, and then
reeled off, like a mutilated creature from some scoundrel French surgeon’s
lecture-table, into the most gorgeous and lavish sunset in the world:
there; only thank me for not taking you at your word, and giving you the
whole ‘story’.—’What I did?’ I went to Trieste, then Venice—then
through Treviso and Bassano to the mountains, delicious Asolo, all my
places and castles, you will see. Then to Vicenza, Padua, and Venice
again. Then to Verona, Trent, Innspruck (the Tyrol), Munich, Salzburg in
Franconia, Frankfort and Mayence; down the Rhine to Cologne, then to
Aix-la-Chapelle, Liege and Antwerp—then home. Shall you come to
town, anywhere near town, soon? I shall be off again as soon as my book is
out, whenever that will be.

I never read that book of Miss Martineau’s, so can’t understand what you
mean. Macready is looking well; I just saw him the other day for a minute
after the play; his Kitely was Kitely—superb from his flat cap down
to his shining shoes. I saw very few Italians, ‘to know’, that is. Those I
did see I liked. Your friend Pepoli has been lecturing here, has he not?

I shall be vexed if you don’t write soon, a long Elstree letter. What are
you doing, writing—drawing? Ever yours truly R. B. To Miss Haworth,
Barham Lodge, Elstree.

Miss Browning’s account of this experience, supplied from memory of her
brother’s letters and conversations, contains some vivid supplementary
details. The drifting away of the wreck put probably no effective distance
between it and the ship; hence the necessity of ‘sailing away’ from it.

‘Of the dead pirates, one had his hands clasped as if praying; another, a
severe gash in his head. The captain burnt disinfectants and blew
gunpowder, before venturing on board, but even then, he, a powerful man,
turned very sick with the smell and sight. They stayed one whole day by
the side, but the sailors, in spite of orders, began to plunder the
cigars, &c. The captain said privately to Robert, “I cannot restrain
my men, and they will bring the plague into our ship, so I mean quietly in
the night to sail away.” Robert took two cutlasses and a dagger; they were
of the coarsest workmanship, intended for use. At the end of one of the
sheaths was a heavy bullet, so that it could be used as a sling. The day
after, to their great relief, a heavy rain fell and cleansed the ship.
Captain Davidson reported the sight of the wreck and its condition as soon
as he arrived at Trieste.’

Miss Browning also relates that the weather was stormy in the Bay of
Biscay, and for the first fortnight her brother suffered terribly. The
captain supported him on to the deck as they passed through the Straits of
Gibraltar, that he might not lose the sight. He recovered, as we know,
sufficiently to write ‘How they brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix’;
but we can imagine in what revulsion of feeling towards firm land and
healthy motion this dream of a headlong gallop was born in him. The poem
was pencilled on the cover of Bartoli’s “De’ Simboli trasportati al
Morale”, a favourite book and constant companion of his; and, in spite of
perfect effacement as far as the sense goes, the pencil dints are still
visible. The little poem ‘Home Thoughts from the Sea’ was written at the
same time, and in the same manner.

By the time they reached Trieste, the captain, a rough north-countryman,
had become so attached to Mr. Browning that he offered him a free passage
to Constantinople; and after they had parted, carefully preserved, by way
of remembrance, a pair of very old gloves worn by him on deck. Mr.
Browning might, on such an occasion, have dispensed with gloves
altogether; but it was one of his peculiarities that he could never endure
to be out of doors with uncovered hands. The captain also showed his
friendly feeling on his return to England by bringing to Miss Browning,
whom he had heard of through her brother, a present of six bottles of
attar of roses.

The inspirations of Asolo and Venice appear in ‘Pippa Passes’ and ‘In a
Gondola’; but the latter poem showed, to Mr. Browning’s subsequent
vexation, that Venice had been imperfectly seen; and the magnetism which
Asolo was to exercise upon him, only fully asserted itself at a much later
time.

A second letter to Miss Haworth is undated, but may have been written at
any period of this or the ensuing year.

I have received, a couple of weeks since, a present—an album large
and gaping, and as Cibber’s Richard says of the ‘fair Elizabeth’: ‘My
heart is empty—she shall fill it’—so say I (impudently?) of my
grand trouble-table, which holds a sketch or two by my fine fellow
Monclar, one lithograph—his own face of faces,—’all the rest
was amethyst.’ F. H. everywhere! not a soul beside ‘in the chrystal
silence there,’ and it locks, this album; now, don’t shower drawings on
M., who has so many advantages over me as it is: or at least don’t bid me
of all others say what he is to have.

The ‘Master’ is somebody you don’t know, W. J. Fox, a magnificent and
poetical nature, who used to write in reviews when I was a boy, and to
whom my verses, a bookful, written at the ripe age of twelve and thirteen,
were shown: which verses he praised not a little; which praise comforted
me not a little. Then I lost sight of him for years and years; then I
published anonymously a little poem—which he, to my
inexpressible delight, praised and expounded in a gallant article in a
magazine of which he was the editor; then I found him out again; he got a
publisher for ‘Paracelsus’ (I read it to him in manuscript) and is in
short ‘my literary father’. Pretty nearly the same thing did he for Miss
Martineau, as she has said somewhere. God knows I forget what the ‘talk’,
table-talk was about—I think she must have told you the results of
the whole day we spent tete-a-tete at Ascot, and that day’s, the
dinner-day’s morning at Elstree and St. Albans. She is to give me advice
about my worldly concerns, and not before I need it!

I cannot say or sing the pleasure your way of writing gives me—do go
on, and tell me all sorts of things, ‘the story’ for a beginning; but your
moralisings on ‘your age’ and the rest, are—now what are
they? not to be reasoned on, disputed, laughed at, grieved about: they are
‘Fanny’s crotchets’. I thank thee, Jew (lia), for teaching me that word.

I don’t know that I shall leave town for a month: my friend Monclar looks
piteous when I talk of such an event. I can’t bear to leave him; he is to
take my portrait to-day (a famous one he has taken!) and very like
he engages it shall be. I am going to town for the purpose. . . .

Now, then, do something for me, and see if I’ll ask Miss M——to
help you! I am going to begin the finishing ‘Sordello’—and to begin
thinking a Tragedy (an Historical one, so I shall want heaps of criticisms
on ‘Strafford’) and I want to have another tragedy in prospect, I
write best so provided: I had chosen a splendid subject for it, when I
learned that a magazine for next, this, month, will have a scene founded
on my story; vulgarizing or doing no good to it: and I accordingly throw
it up. I want a subject of the most wild and passionate love, to contrast
with the one I mean to have ready in a short time. I have many
half-conceptions, floating fancies: give me your notion of a thorough
self-devotement, self-forgetting; should it be a woman who loves thus, or
a man? What circumstances will best draw out, set forth this feeling? . .
.

The tragedies in question were to be ‘King Victor and King Charles’, and
‘The Return of the Druses’.

This letter affords a curious insight into Mr. Browning’s mode of work; it
is also very significant of the small place which love had hitherto
occupied in his life. It was evident, from his appeal to Miss Haworth’s
‘notion’ on the subject, that he had as yet no experience, even imaginary,
of a genuine passion, whether in woman or man. The experience was still
distant from him in point of time. In circumstance he was nearer to it
than he knew; for it was in 1839 that he became acquainted with Mr.
Kenyon.

When dining one day at Serjeant Talfourd’s, he was accosted by a pleasant
elderly man, who, having, we conclude, heard who he was, asked leave to
address to him a few questions: ‘Was his father’s name Robert? had he gone
to school at the Rev. Mr. Bell’s at Cheshunt, and was he still alive?’ On
receiving affirmative answers, he went on to say that Mr. Browning and he
had been great chums at school, and though they had lost sight of each
other in after-life, he had never forgotten his old playmate, but even
alluded to him in a little book which he had published a few years
before.*

The next morning the poet asked his father if he remembered a schoolfellow
named John Kenyon. He replied, ‘Certainly! This is his face,’ and sketched
a boy’s head, in which his son at once recognized that of the grown man.
The acquaintance was renewed, and Mr. Kenyon proved ever afterwards a warm
friend. Mr. Browning wrote of him, in a letter to Professor Knight of St.
Andrews, Jan. 10, 1884: ‘He was one of the best of human beings, with a
general sympathy for excellence of every kind. He enjoyed the friendship
of Wordsworth, of Southey, of Landor, and, in later days, was intimate
with most of my contemporaries of eminence.’ It was at Mr. Kenyon’s house
that the poet saw most of Wordsworth, who always stayed there when he came
to town.

In 1840 ‘Sordello’ appeared. It was, relatively to its length, by far the
slowest in preparation of Mr. Browning’s poems. This seemed, indeed, a
condition of its peculiar character. It had lain much deeper in the
author’s mind than the various slighter works which were thrown off in the
course of its inception. We know from the preface to ‘Strafford’ that it
must have been begun soon after ‘Paracelsus’. Its plan may have belonged
to a still earlier date; for it connects itself with ‘Pauline’ as the
history of a poetic soul; with both the earlier poems, as the
manifestation of the self-conscious spiritual ambitions which were
involved in that history. This first imaginative mood was also outgrowing
itself in the very act of self-expression; for the tragedies written
before the conclusion of ‘Sordello’ impress us as the product of a
different mental state—as the work of a more balanced imagination
and a more mature mind.

It would be interesting to learn how Mr. Browning’s typical poet became
embodied in this mediaeval form: whether the half-mythical character of
the real Sordello presented him as a fitting subject for imaginative
psychological treatment, or whether the circumstances among which he moved
seemed the best adapted to the development of the intended type. The
inspiration may have come through the study of Dante, and his testimony to
the creative influence of Sordello on their mother-tongue. That period of
Italian history must also have assumed, if it did not already possess, a
great charm for Mr. Browning’s fancy, since he studied no less than thirty
works upon it, which were to contribute little more to his dramatic
picture than what he calls ‘decoration’, or ‘background’. But the one
guide which he has given us to the reading of the poem is his assertion
that its historical circumstance is only to be regarded as background; and
the extent to which he identified himself with the figure of Sordello has
been proved by his continued belief that its prominence was throughout
maintained. He could still declare, so late as 1863, in his preface to the
reprint of the work, that his ‘stress’ in writing it had lain ‘on the
incidents in the development of a soul, little else’ being to his mind
‘worth study’. I cannot therefore help thinking that recent investigations
of the life and character of the actual poet, however in themselves
praiseworthy and interesting, have been often in some degree a mistake;
because, directly or indirectly, they referred Mr. Browning’s Sordello to
an historical reality, which his author had grasped, as far as was then
possible, but to which he was never intended to conform.

Sordello’s story does exhibit the development of a soul; or rather, the
sudden awakening of a self-regarding nature to the claims of other men—the
sudden, though slowly prepared, expansion of the narrower into the larger
self, the selfish into the sympathetic existence; and this takes place in
accordance with Mr. Browning’s here expressed belief that poetry is the
appointed vehicle for all lasting truths; that the true poet must be their
exponent. The work is thus obviously, in point of moral utterance, an
advance on ‘Pauline’. Its metaphysics are, also, more distinctly
formulated than those of either ‘Pauline’ or ‘Paracelsus’; and the
frequent use of the term Will in its metaphysical sense so strongly points
to German associations that it is difficult to realize their absence, then
and always, from Mr. Browning’s mind. But he was emphatic in his assurance
that he knew neither the German philosophers nor their reflection in
Coleridge, who would have seemed a likely medium between them and him.
Miss Martineau once said to him that he had no need to study German
thought, since his mind was German enough—by which she possibly
meant too German—already.

The poem also impresses us by a Gothic richness of detail,* the
picturesque counterpart of its intricacy of thought, and, perhaps for this
very reason, never so fully displayed in any subsequent work. Mr.
Browning’s genuinely modest attitude towards it could not preclude the
consciousness of the many imaginative beauties which its unpopular
character had served to conceal; and he was glad to find, some years ago,
that ‘Sordello’ was represented in a collection of descriptive passages
which a friend of his was proposing to make. ‘There is a great deal of
that in it,’ he said, ‘and it has always been overlooked.’

It was unfortunate that new difficulties of style should have added
themselves on this occasion to those of subject and treatment; and the
reason of it is not generally known. Mr. John Sterling had made some
comments on the wording of ‘Paracelsus’; and Miss Caroline Fox, then quite
a young woman, repeated them, with additions, to Miss Haworth, who, in her
turn, communicated them to Mr. Browning, but without making quite clear to
him the source from which they sprang. He took the criticism much more
seriously than it deserved, and condensed the language of this his next
important publication into what was nearly its present form.

In leaving ‘Sordello’ we emerge from the self-conscious stage of Mr.
Browning’s imagination, and his work ceases to be autobiographic in the
sense in which, perhaps erroneously, we have hitherto felt it to be.
‘Festus’ and ‘Salinguerra’ have already given promise of the world of ‘Men
and Women’ into which he will now conduct us. They will be inspired by
every variety of conscious motive, but never again by the old (real or
imagined) self-centred, self-directing Will. We have, indeed, already lost
the sense of disparity between the man and the poet; for the Browning of
‘Sordello’ was growing older, while the defects of the poem were in many
respects those of youth. In ‘Pippa Passes’, published one year later, the
poet and the man show themselves full-grown. Each has entered on the
inheritance of the other.

Neither the imagination nor the passion of what Mr. Gosse so fitly calls
this ‘lyrical masque’* gives much scope for tenderness; but the quality of
humour is displayed in it for the first time; as also a strongly marked
philosophy of life—or more properly, of association—from which
its idea and development are derived. In spite, however, of these
evidences of general maturity, Mr. Browning was still sometimes boyish in
personal intercourse, if we may judge from a letter to Miss Flower written
at about the same time.

Monday night, March 9 (? 1841).

My dear Miss Flower,—I have this moment received your very kind note—of
course, I understand your objections. How else? But they are somewhat
lightened already (confess—nay ‘confess’ is vile—you will be
rejoiced to holla from the house-top)—will go on, or rather go off,
lightening, and will be—oh, where will they be half a dozen
years hence?

Meantime praise what you can praise, do me all the good you can, you and
Mr. Fox (as if you will not!) for I have a head full of projects—mean
to song-write, play-write forthwith,—and, believe me, dear Miss
Flower, Yours ever faithfully, Robert Browning.

By the way, you speak of ‘Pippa’—could we not make some arrangement
about it? The lyrics want your music—five or six in all—how
say you? When these three plays are out I hope to build a huge Ode—but
‘all goeth by God’s Will.’

The loyal Alfred Domett now appears on the scene with a satirical poem,
inspired by an impertinent criticism on his friend. I give its first two
verses:

On a Certain Critique on ‘Pippa Passes’.

(Query—Passes what?—the critic’s comprehension.)

The writer lived to do better things from a literary point of view; but
these lines have a fine ring of youthful indignation which must have made
them a welcome tribute to friendship.

There seems to have been little respectful criticism of ‘Pippa Passes’; it
is less surprising that there should have been very little of ‘Sordello’.
Mr. Browning, it is true, retained a limited number of earnest
appreciators, foremost of whom was the writer of an admirable notice of
these two works, quoted from an ‘Eclectic Review’ of 1847, in Dr.
Furnivall’s ‘Bibliography’. I am also told that the series of poems which
was next to appear was enthusiastically greeted by some poets and painters
of the pre-Raphaelite school; but he was now entering on a period of
general neglect, which covered nearly twenty years of his life, and much
that has since become most deservedly popular in his work.

‘Pippa Passes’ had appeared as the first instalment of ‘Bells and
Pomegranates’, the history of which I give in Mr. Gosse’s words. This
poem, and the two tragedies, ‘King Victor and King Charles’ and ‘The
Return of the Druses’—first christened ‘Mansoor, the Hierophant’—were
lying idle in Mr. Browning’s desk. He had not found, perhaps not very
vigorously sought, a publisher for them.

‘One day, as the poet was discussing the matter with Mr. Edward Moxon, the
publisher, the latter remarked that at that time he was bringing out some
editions of the old Elizabethan dramatists in a comparatively cheap form,
and that if Mr. Browning would consent to print his poems as pamphlets,
using this cheap type, the expense would be very inconsiderable. The poet
jumped at the idea, and it was agreed that each poem should form a
separate brochure of just one sheet—sixteen pages in double columns—the
entire cost of which should not exceed twelve or fifteen pounds. In this
fashion began the celebrated series of ‘Bells and Pomegranates’, eight
numbers of which, a perfect treasury of fine poetry, came out successively
between 1841 and 1846. ‘Pippa Passes’ led the way, and was priced first at
sixpence; then, the sale being inconsiderable, at a shilling, which
greatly encouraged the sale; and so, slowly, up to half-a-crown, at which
the price of each number finally rested.’

Mr. Browning’s hopes and intentions with respect to this series are
announced in the following preface to ‘Pippa Passes’, of which, in later
editions, only the dedicatory words appear:

‘Two or three years ago I wrote a Play, about which the chief matter I
care to recollect at present is, that a Pit-full of good-natured people
applauded it:—ever since, I have been desirous of doing something in
the same way that should better reward their attention. What follows I
mean for the first of a series of Dramatical Pieces, to come out at
intervals, and I amuse myself by fancying that the cheap mode in which
they appear will for once help me to a sort of Pit-audience again. Of
course, such a work must go on no longer than it is liked; and to provide
against a certain and but too possible contingency, let me hasten to say
now—what, if I were sure of success, I would try to say
circumstantially enough at the close—that I dedicate my best
intentions most admiringly to the author of “Ion”—most
affectionately to Serjeant Talfourd.’

A necessary explanation of the general title was reserved for the last
number: and does something towards justifying the popular impression that
Mr. Browning exacted a large measure of literary insight from his readers.

‘Here ends my first series of “Bells and Pomegranates”: and I take the
opportunity of explaining, in reply to inquiries, that I only meant by
that title to indicate an endeavour towards something like an alternation,
or mixture, of music with discoursing, sound with sense, poetry with
thought; which looks too ambitious, thus expressed, so the symbol was
preferred. It is little to the purpose, that such is actually one of the
most familiar of the many Rabbinical (and Patristic) acceptations of the
phrase; because I confess that, letting authority alone, I supposed the
bare words, in such juxtaposition, would sufficiently convey the desired
meaning. “Faith and good works” is another fancy, for instance, and
perhaps no easier to arrive at: yet Giotto placed a pomegranate fruit in
the hand of Dante, and Raffaelle crowned his Theology (in the ‘Camera
della Segnatura’) with blossoms of the same; as if the Bellari and Vasari
would be sure to come after, and explain that it was merely “simbolo delle
buone opere—il qual Pomogranato fu pero usato nelle vesti del
Pontefice appresso gli Ebrei.”‘

The Dramas and Poems contained in the eight numbers of ‘Bells and
Pomegranates’ were:

This publication has seemed entitled to a detailed notice, because it is
practically extinct, and because its nature and circumstance confer on it
a biographical interest not possessed by any subsequent issue of Mr.
Browning’s works. The dramas and poems of which it is composed belong to
that more mature period of the author’s life, in which the analysis of his
work ceases to form a necessary part of his history. Some few of them,
however, are significant to it; and this is notably the case with ‘A Blot
in the ‘Scutcheon’.

Chapter 8

1841-1844

‘A Blot in the ‘Scutcheon’—Letters to Mr. Frank Hill; Lady Martin—Charles
Dickens—Other Dramas and Minor Poems—Letters to Miss Lee; Miss
Haworth; Miss Flower—Second Italian Journey; Naples—E. J.
Trelawney—Stendhal.

‘A Blot in the ‘Scutcheon’ was written for Macready, who meant to perform
the principal part; and we may conclude that the appeal for it was urgent,
since it was composed in the space of four or five days. Macready’s
journals must have contained a fuller reference to both the play and its
performance (at Drury Lane, February 1843) than appears in published form;
but considerable irritation had arisen between him and Mr. Browning, and
he possibly wrote something which his editor, Sir Frederick Pollock, as
the friend of both, thought it best to omit. What occurred on this
occasion has been told in some detail by Mr. Gosse, and would not need
repeating if the question were only of re-telling it on the same
authority, in another person’s words; but, through the kindness of Mr. and
Mrs. Frank Hill, I am able to give Mr. Browning’s direct statement of the
case, as also his expressed judgment upon it. The statement was made more
than forty years later than the events to which it refers, but will,
nevertheless, be best given in its direct connection with them.

The merits, or demerits, of ‘A Blot in the ‘Scutcheon’ had been freshly
brought under discussion by its performance in London through the action
of the Browning Society, and in Washington by Mr. Laurence Barrett; and it
became the subject of a paragraph in one of the theatrical articles
prepared for the ‘Daily News’. Mr. Hill was then editor of the paper, and
when the article came to him for revision, he thought it right to submit
to Mr. Browning the passages devoted to his tragedy, which embodied some
then prevailing, but, he strongly suspected, erroneous impressions
concerning it. The results of this kind and courteous proceeding appear in
the following letter.

19, Warwick Crescent: December 15, 1884.

My dear Mr. Hill,—It was kind and considerate of you to suppress the
paragraph which you send me,—and of which the publication would have
been unpleasant for reasons quite other than as regarding my own work,—which
exists to defend or accuse itself. You will judge of the true reasons when
I tell you the facts—so much of them as contradicts the statements
of your critic—who, I suppose, has received a stimulus from the
notice, in an American paper which arrived last week, of Mr. Laurence
Barrett’s intention ‘shortly to produce the play’ in New York—and
subsequently in London: so that ‘the failure’ of forty-one years ago might
be duly influential at present—or two years hence perhaps. The ‘mere
amateurs’ are no high game.

Macready received and accepted the play, while he was engaged at the
Haymarket, and retained it for Drury Lane, of which I was ignorant that he
was about to become the manager: he accepted it ‘at the instigation’ of
nobody,—and Charles Dickens was not in England when he did so: it
was read to him after his return, by Forster—and the glowing letter
which contains his opinion of it, although directed by him to be shown to
myself, was never heard of nor seen by me till printed in Forster’s book
some thirty years after. When the Drury Lane season began, Macready
informed me that he should act the play when he had brought out two others—’The
Patrician’s Daughter’, and ‘Plighted Troth’: having done so, he wrote to
me that the former had been unsuccessful in money-drawing, and the latter
had ‘smashed his arrangements altogether’: but he would still produce my
play. I had—in my ignorance of certain symptoms better understood by
Macready’s professional acquaintances—I had no notion that it was a
proper thing, in such a case, to ‘release him from his promise’; on the
contrary, I should have fancied that such a proposal was offensive. Soon
after, Macready begged that I would call on him: he said the play had been
read to the actors the day before, ‘and laughed at from beginning to end’:
on my speaking my mind about this, he explained that the reading had been
done by the Prompter, a grotesque person with a red nose and wooden leg,
ill at ease in the love scenes, and that he would himself make amends by
reading the play next morning—which he did, and very adequately—but
apprised me that, in consequence of the state of his mind, harassed by
business and various trouble, the principal character must be taken by Mr.
Phelps; and again I failed to understand,—what Forster subsequently
assured me was plain as the sun at noonday,—that to allow at
Macready’s Theatre any other than Macready to play the principal part in a
new piece was suicidal,—and really believed I was meeting his
exigencies by accepting the substitution. At the rehearsal, Macready
announced that Mr. Phelps was ill, and that he himself would read the
part: on the third rehearsal, Mr. Phelps appeared for the first time, and
sat in a chair while Macready more than read, rehearsed the part. The next
morning Mr. Phelps waylaid me at the stage-door to say, with much emotion,
that it never was intended that he should be instrumental in the
success of a new tragedy, and that Macready would play Tresham on the
ground that himself, Phelps, was unable to do so. He added that he could
not expect me to waive such an advantage,—but that, if I were
prepared to waive it, ‘he would take ether, sit up all night, and have the
words in his memory by next day.’ I bade him follow me to the green-room,
and hear what I decided upon—which was that as Macready had given
him the part, he should keep it: this was on a Thursday; he rehearsed on
Friday and Saturday,—the play being acted the same evening,—of
the fifth day after the ‘reading’ by MacReady. Macready at once wished
to reduce the importance of the ‘play’,—as he styled it in the
bills,—tried to leave out so much of the text, that I baffled him by
getting it printed in four-and-twenty hours, by Moxon’s assistance. He
wanted me to call it ‘The Sister’!—and I have before me, while I
write, the stage-acting copy, with two lines of his own insertion to avoid
the tragical ending—Tresham was to announce his intention of going
into a monastery! all this, to keep up the belief that Macready, and
Macready alone, could produce a veritable ‘tragedy’, unproduced before.
Not a shilling was spent on scenery or dresses—and a striking scene
which had been used for the ‘Patrician’s Daughter’, did duty a second
time. If your critic considers this treatment of the play an instance of
‘the failure of powerful and experienced actors’ to ensure its success,—I
can only say that my own opinion was shown by at once breaking off a
friendship of many years—a friendship which had a right to be
plainly and simply told that the play I had contributed as a proof of it,
would through a change of circumstances, no longer be to my friend’s
advantage,—all I could possibly care for. Only recently, when by the
publication of Macready’s journals the extent of his pecuniary
embarrassments at that time was made known, could I in a measure
understand his motives for such conduct—and less than ever
understand why he so strangely disguised and disfigured them. If
‘applause’ means success, the play thus maimed and maltreated was
successful enough: it ‘made way’ for Macready’s own Benefit, and the
Theatre closed a fortnight after.

Having kept silence for all these years, in spite of repeated
explanations, in the style of your critic’s, that the play ‘failed in
spite of the best endeavours’ &c. I hardly wish to revive a very
painful matter: on the other hand,—as I have said; my play subsists,
and is as open to praise or blame as it was forty-one years ago: is it
necessary to search out what somebody or other,—not improbably a
jealous adherent of Macready, ‘the only organizer of theatrical
victories’, chose to say on the subject? If the characters are ‘abhorrent’
and ‘inscrutable’—and the language conformable,—they were so
when Dickens pronounced upon them, and will be so whenever the critic
pleases to re-consider them—which, if he ever has an opportunity of
doing, apart from the printed copy, I can assure you is through no motion
of mine. This particular experience was sufficient: but the Play is out of
my power now; though amateurs and actors may do what they please.

Of course, this being the true story, I should desire that it were told thus
and no otherwise, if it must be told at all: but not as a statement
of mine,—the substance of it has been partly stated already by more
than one qualified person, and if I have been willing to let the poor
matter drop, surely there is no need that it should be gone into now when
Macready and his Athenaeum upholder are no longer able to speak for
themselves: this is just a word to you, dear Mr. Hill, and may be brought
under the notice of your critic if you think proper—but only for the
facts—not as a communication for the public.

Yes, thank you, I am in full health, as you wish—and I wish you and
Mrs. Hill, I assure you, all the good appropriate to the season. My sister
has completely recovered from her illness, and is grateful for your
enquiries.

With best regards to Mrs. Hill, and an apology for this long letter, which
however,—when once induced to write it,—I could not well
shorten,—believe me, Yours truly ever Robert Browning.

I well remember Mr. Browning’s telling me how, when he returned to the
green-room, on that critical day, he drove his hat more firmly on to his
head, and said to Macready, ‘I beg pardon, sir, but you have given the
part to Mr. Phelps, and I am satisfied that he should act it;’ and how
Macready, on hearing this, crushed up the MS., and flung it on to the
ground. He also admitted that his own manner had been provocative; but he
was indignant at what he deemed the unjust treatment which Mr. Phelps had
received. The occasion of the next letter speaks for itself.

December 21, 1884.

My dear Mr. Hill,—Your goodness must extend to letting me have the
last word—one of sincere thanks. You cannot suppose I doubted for a
moment of a good-will which I have had abundant proof of. I only took the
occasion your considerate letter gave me, to tell the simple truth which
my forty years’ silence is a sign I would only tell on compulsion. I never
thought your critic had any less generous motive for alluding to the
performance as he did than that which he professes: he doubtless heard the
account of the matter which Macready and his intimates gave currency to at
the time; and which, being confined for a while to their limited number, I
never chose to notice. But of late years I have got to read,—not
merely hear,—of the play’s failure ‘which all the efforts of
my friend the great actor could not avert;’ and the nonsense of this
untruth gets hard to bear. I told you the principal facts in the letter I
very hastily wrote: I could, had it been worth while, corroborate them by
others in plenty, and refer to the living witnesses—Lady Martin,
Mrs. Stirling, and (I believe) Mr. Anderson: it was solely through the
admirable loyalty of the two former that . . . a play . . . deprived of
every advantage, in the way of scenery, dresses, and rehearsing—proved—what
Macready himself declared it to be—’a complete success’. So
he sent a servant to tell me, ‘in case there was a call for the author at
the end of the act’—to which I replied that the author had been too
sick and sorry at the whole treatment of his play to do any such thing.
Such a call there truly was, and Mr. Anderson had to come forward
and ‘beg the author to come forward if he were in the house—a
circumstance of which he was not aware:’ whereat the author laughed at him
from a box just opposite. . . . I would submit to anybody drawing a
conclusion from one or two facts past contradiction, whether that play
could have thoroughly failed which was not only not withdrawn at once but
acted three nights in the same week, and years afterwards, reproduced at
his own theatre, during my absence in Italy, by Mr. Phelps—the
person most completely aware of the untoward circumstances which stood
originally in the way of success. Why not enquire how it happens that,
this second time, there was no doubt of the play’s doing as well as plays
ordinarily do? for those were not the days of a ‘run’.

. . . . .

. . . This ‘last word’ has indeed been an Aristophanic one of fifty
syllables: but I have spoken it, relieved myself, and commend all that
concerns me to the approved and valued friend of whom I am proud to
account myself in corresponding friendship, His truly ever Robert
Browning.

Mr. Browning also alludes to Mr. Phelps’s acting as not only not having
been detrimental to the play, but having helped to save it, in the
conspiracy of circumstances which seemed to invoke its failure. This was a
mistake, since Macready had been anxious to resume the part, and would
have saved it, to say the least, more thoroughly. It must, however, be
remembered that the irritation which these letters express was due much
less to the nature of the facts recorded in them than to the manner in
which they had been brought before Mr. Browning’s mind. Writing on the
subject to Lady Martin in February 1881, he had spoken very temperately of
Macready’s treatment of his play, while deprecating the injustice towards
his own friendship which its want of frankness involved: and many years
before this, the touch of a common sorrow had caused the old feeling, at
least momentarily, to well up again. The two met for the first time after
these occurrences when Mr. Browning had returned, a widower, from Italy.
Mr. Macready, too, had recently lost his wife; and Mr. Browning could only
start forward, grasp the hand of his old friend, and in a voice choked
with emotion say, ‘O Macready!’

Lady Martin has spoken to me of the poet’s attitude on the occasion of
this performance as being full of generous sympathy for those who were
working with him, as well as of the natural anxiety of a young author for
his own success. She also remains convinced that this sympathy led him
rather to over-than to under-rate the support he received. She wrote
concerning it in ‘Blackwood’s Magazine’, March 1881:

‘It seems but yesterday that I sat by his [Mr. Elton’s] side in the
green-room at the reading of Robert Browning’s beautiful drama, ‘A Blot in
the ‘Scutcheon’. As a rule Mr. Macready always read the new plays. But
owing, I suppose, to some press of business, the task was entrusted on
this occasion to the head prompter,—a clever man in his way, but
wholly unfitted to bring out, or even to understand, Mr. Browning’s
meaning. Consequently, the delicate, subtle lines were twisted, perverted,
and sometimes even made ridiculous in his hands. My “cruel father” [Mr.
Elton] was a warm admirer of the poet. He sat writhing and indignant, and
tried by gentle asides to make me see the real meaning of the verse. But
somehow the mischief proved irreparable, for a few of the actors during
the rehearsals chose to continue to misunderstand the text, and never took
the interest in the play which they would have done had Mr. Macready read
it.’

Looking back on the first appearance of his tragedy through the widening
perspectives of nearly forty years, Mr. Browning might well declare as he
did in the letter to Lady Martin to which I have just referred, that her ‘perfect
behaviour as a woman’ and her ‘admirable playing as an actress’ had been
(or at all events were) to him ‘the one gratifying circumstance connected
with it.’

He also felt it a just cause of bitterness that the letter from Charles
Dickens,* which conveyed his almost passionate admiration of ‘A Blot in
the ‘Scutcheon’, and was clearly written to Mr. Forster in order that it
might be seen, was withheld for thirty years from his knowledge, and that
of the public whose judgment it might so largely have influenced. Nor was
this the only time in the poet’s life that fairly earned honours escaped
him.

‘Colombe’s Birthday’ was produced in 1853 at the Haymarket;* and
afterwards in the provinces, under the direction of Miss Helen Faucit, who
created the principal part. It was again performed for the Browning
Society in 1885,** and although Miss Alma Murray, as Colombe, was almost
entirely supported by amateurs, the result fully justified Miss Mary
Robinson (now Madame James Darmesteter) in writing immediately afterwards
in the Boston ‘Literary World’:***

‘”Colombe’s Birthday” is charming on the boards, clearer, more direct in
action, more full of delicate surprises than one imagines it in print.
With a very little cutting it could be made an excellent acting play.’

Mr. Gosse has seen a first edition copy of it marked for acting, and
alludes in his ‘Personalia’ to the greatly increased knowledge of the
stage which its minute directions displayed. They told also of sad
experience in the sacrifice of the poet which the play-writer so often
exacts: since they included the proviso that unless a very good Valence
could be found, a certain speech of his should be left out. That speech is
very important to the poetic, and not less to the moral, purpose of the
play: the triumph of unworldly affections. It is that in which Valence
defies the platitudes so often launched against rank and power, and shows
that these may be very beautiful things—in which he pleads for his
rival, and against his own heart. He is the better man of the two, and
Colombe has fallen genuinely in love with him. But the instincts of
sovereignty are not outgrown in one day however eventful, and the young
duchess has shown herself amply endowed with them. The Prince’s offer
promised much, and it held still more. The time may come when she will
need that crowning memory of her husband’s unselfishness and truth, not to
regret what she has done.

‘King Victor and King Charles’ and ‘The Return of the Druses’ are both
admitted by competent judges to have good qualifications for the stage;
and Mr. Browning would have preferred seeing one of these acted to
witnessing the revival of ‘Strafford’ or ‘A Blot in the ‘Scutcheon’, from
neither of which the best amateur performance could remove the stigma of
past, real or reputed, failure; and when once a friend belonging to the
Browning Society told him she had been seriously occupied with the
possibility of producing the Eastern play, he assented to the idea with a
simplicity that was almost touching, ‘It was written for the
stage,’ he said, ‘and has only one scene.’ He knew, however, that the
single scene was far from obviating all the difficulties of the case, and
that the Society, with its limited means, did the best it could.

I seldom hear any allusion to a passage in ‘King Victor and King Charles’
which I think more than rivals the famous utterance of Valence, revealing
as it does the same grasp of non-conventional truth, while its occasion
lends itself to a far deeper recognition of the mystery, the frequent
hopeless dilemma of our moral life. It is that in which Polixena, the wife
of Charles, entreats him for duty’s sake to retain the crown,
though he will earn, by so doing, neither the credit of a virtuous deed
nor the sure, persistent consciousness of having performed one.

Four poems of the ‘Dramatic Lyrics’ had appeared, as I have said, in the
‘Monthly Repository’. Six of those included in the ‘Dramatic Lyrics and
Romances’ were first published in ‘Hood’s Magazine’ from June 1844 to
April 1845, a month before Hood’s death. These poems were, ‘The
Laboratory’, ‘Claret and Tokay’, ‘Garden Fancies’, ‘The Boy and the
Angel’, ‘The Tomb at St. Praxed’s’, and ‘The Flight of the Duchess’. Mr.
Hood’s health had given way under stress of work, and Mr. Browning with
other friends thus came forward to help him. The fact deserves remembering
in connection with his subsequent unbroken rule never to write for
magazines. He might always have made exceptions for friendly or
philanthropic objects; the appearance of ‘Herve Riel’ in the ‘Cornhill
Magazine’, 1870, indeed proves that it was so. But the offer of a blank
cheque would not have tempted him, for his own sake, to this concession,
as he would have deemed it, of his integrity of literary purpose.

‘In a Gondola’ grew out of a single verse extemporized for a picture by
Maclise, in what circumstances we shall hear in the poet’s own words.

The first proof of ‘Artemis Prologuizes’ had the following note:

‘I had better say perhaps that the above is nearly all retained of a
tragedy I composed, much against my endeavour, while in bed with a fever
two years ago—it went farther into the story of Hippolytus and
Aricia; but when I got well, putting only thus much down at once, I soon
forgot the remainder.’*

Mr. Browning would have been very angry with himself if he had known he
ever wrote ‘I had better’; and the punctuation of this note, as
well as of every other unrevised specimen which we possess of his early
writing, helps to show by what careful study of the literary art he must
have acquired his subsequent mastery of it.

‘Cristina’ was addressed in fancy to the Spanish queen. It is to be
regretted that the poem did not remain under its original heading of
‘Queen Worship’: as this gave a practical clue to the nature of the love
described, and the special remoteness of its object.

‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’ and another poem were written in May 1842 for
Mr. Macready’s little eldest son, Willy, who was confined to the house by
illness, and who was to amuse himself by illustrating the poems as well as
reading them;* and the first of these, though not intended for
publication, was added to the ‘Dramatic Lyrics’, because some columns of
that number of ‘Bells and Pomegranates’ still required filling. It is
perhaps not known that the second was ‘Crescentius, the Pope’s Legate’:
now included in ‘Asolando’.

Mr. Browning’s father had himself begun a rhymed story on the subject of
‘The Pied Piper’; but left it unfinished when he discovered that his son
was writing one. The fragment survives as part of a letter addressed to
Mr. Thomas Powell, and which I have referred to as in the possession of
Mr. Dykes Campbell.

‘The Lost Leader’ has given rise to periodical questionings continued
until the present day, as to the person indicated in its title. Mr.
Browning answered or anticipated them fifteen years ago in a letter to
Miss Lee, of West Peckham, Maidstone. It was his reply to an application
in verse made to him in their very young days by herself and two other
members of her family, the manner of which seems to have unusually pleased
him.

Villers-sur-mer, Calvados, France: September 7, ’75.

Dear Friends,—Your letter has made a round to reach me—hence
the delay in replying to it—which you will therefore pardon. I have
been asked the question you put to me—tho’ never asked so poetically
and so pleasantly—I suppose a score of times: and I can only answer,
with something of shame and contrition, that I undoubtedly had Wordsworth
in my mind—but simply as ‘a model’; you know, an artist takes one or
two striking traits in the features of his ‘model’, and uses them to start
his fancy on a flight which may end far enough from the good man or woman
who happens to be ‘sitting’ for nose and eye.

I thought of the great Poet’s abandonment of liberalism, at an unlucky
juncture, and no repaying consequence that I could ever see. But—once
call my fancy-portrait ‘Wordsworth’—and how much more ought one to
say,—how much more would not I have attempted to say!

There is my apology, dear friends, and your acceptance of it will confirm
me Truly yours, Robert Browning.

Some fragments of correspondence, not all very interesting, and his own
allusion to an attack of illness, are our only record of the poet’s
general life during the interval which separated the publication of ‘Pippa
Passes’ from his second Italian journey.

An undated letter to Miss Haworth probably refers to the close of 1841.

‘. . . I am getting to love painting as I did once. Do you know I was a
young wonder (as are eleven out of the dozen of us) at drawing? My father
had faith in me, and over yonder in a drawer of mine lies, I well know, a
certain cottage and rocks in lead pencil and black currant jam-juice
(paint being rank poison, as they said when I sucked my brushes) with his
(my father’s) note in one corner, “R. B., aetat. two years three months.”
“How fast, alas, our days we spend—How vain they be, how soon they
end!” I am going to print “Victor”, however, by February, and there is one
thing not so badly painted in there—oh, let me tell you. I chanced
to call on Forster the other day, and he pressed me into committing verse
on the instant, not the minute, in Maclise’s behalf, who has wrought a
divine Venetian work, it seems, for the British Institution. Forster
described it well—but I could do nothing better, than this wooden
ware—(all the “properties”, as we say, were given, and the problem
was how to catalogue them in rhyme and unreason).

Singing and stars and night and Venice streets and joyous heart, are
properties, do you please to see. And now tell me, is this below the
average of catalogue original poetry? Tell me—for to that end of
being told, I write. . . . I dined with dear Carlyle and his wife (catch
me calling people “dear” in a hurry, except in letter-beginnings!)
yesterday. I don’t know any people like them. There was a son of Burns
there, Major Burns whom Macready knows—he sung “Of all the airts”,
“John Anderson”, and another song of his father’s. . . .’

In the course of 1842 he wrote the following note to Miss Flower,
evidently relating to the publication of her ‘Hymns and Anthems’.

New Cross, Hatcham, Surrey: Tuesday morning.

Dear Miss Flower,—I am sorry for what must grieve Mr. Fox; for
myself, I beg him earnestly not to see me till his entire convenience,
however pleased I shall be to receive the letter you promise on his part.

And how can I thank you enough for this good news—all this music I
shall be so thoroughly gratified to hear? Ever yours faithfully, Robert
Browning.

His last letter to her was written in 1845; the subject being a concert of
her own sacred music which she was about to give; and again, although more
slightly, I anticipate the course of events, in order to give it in its
natural connection with the present one. Mr. Browning was now engaged to
be married, and the last ring of youthful levity had disappeared from his
tone; but neither the new happiness nor the new responsibility had
weakened his interest in his boyhood’s friend. Miss Flower must then have
been slowly dying, and the closing words of the letter have the solemnity
of a last farewell.

Sunday.

Dear Miss Flower,—I was very foolishly surprized at the sorrowful
finical notice you mention: foolishly; for, God help us, how else is it
with all critics of everything—don’t I hear them talk and see them
write? I dare-say he admires you as he said.

For me, I never had another feeling than entire admiration for your music—entire
admiration—I put it apart from all other English music I know, and
fully believe in it as the music we all waited for.

Of your health I shall not trust myself to speak: you must know what is
unspoken. I should have been most happy to see you if but for a minute—and
if next Wednesday, I might take your hand for a moment.—

But you would concede that, if it were right, remembering what is now very
old friendship. May God bless you for ever (The signature has been cut
off.)

In the autumn of 1844 Mr. Browning set forth for Italy, taking ship, it is
believed, direct to Naples. Here he made the acquaintance of a young
Neapolitan gentleman who had spent most of his life in Paris; and they
became such good friends that they proceeded to Rome together. Mr. Scotti
was an invaluable travelling companion, for he engaged their conveyance,
and did all such bargaining in their joint interest as the habits of his
country required. ‘As I write,’ Mr. Browning said in a letter to his
sister, ‘I hear him disputing our bill in the next room. He does not see
why we should pay for six wax candles when we have used only two.’ At Rome
they spent most of their evenings with an old acquaintance of Mr.
Browning’s, then Countess Carducci, and she pronounced Mr. Scotti the
handsomest man she had ever seen. He certainly bore no appearance of being
the least prosperous. But he blew out his brains soon after he and his new
friend had parted; and I do not think the act was ever fully accounted
for.

It must have been on his return journey that Mr. Browning went to Leghorn
to see Edward John Trelawney, to whom he carried a letter of introduction.
He described the interview long afterwards to Mr. Val Prinsep, but chiefly
in his impressions of the cool courage which Mr. Trelawney had displayed
during its course. A surgeon was occupied all the time in probing his leg
for a bullet which had been lodged there some years before, and had lately
made itself felt; and he showed himself absolutely indifferent to the pain
of the operation. Mr. Browning’s main object in paying the visit had been,
naturally, to speak with one who had known Byron and been the last to see
Shelley alive; but we only hear of the two poets that they formed in part
the subject of their conversation. He reached England, again, we suppose,
through Germany—since he avoided Paris as before.

It has been asserted by persons otherwise well informed, that on this, if
not on his previous Italian journey, Mr. Browning became acquainted with
Stendhal, then French Consul at Civita Vecchia, and that he imbibed from
the great novelist a taste for curiosities of Italian family history,
which ultimately led him in the direction of the Franceschini case. It is
certain that he profoundly admired this writer, and if he was not, at some
time or other, introduced to him it was because the opportunity did not
occur. But there is abundant evidence that no introduction took place, and
quite sufficient proof that none was possible. Stendhal died in Paris in
March 1842; and granting that he was at Civita Vecchia when the poet made
his earlier voyage—no certainty even while he held the appointment—the
ship cannot have touched there on its way to Trieste. It is also a mistake
to suppose that Mr. Browning was specially interested in ancient
chronicles, as such. This was one of the points on which he distinctly
differed from his father. He took his dramatic subjects wherever he found
them, and any historical research which they ultimately involved was
undertaken for purposes of verification. ‘Sordello’ alone may have been
conceived on a rather different plan, and I have no authority whatever for
admitting that it was so. The discovery of the record of the Franceschini
case was, as its author has everywhere declared, an accident.

A single relic exists for us of this visit to the South—a shell
picked up, according to its inscription, on one of the Syren Isles,
October 4, 1844; but many of its reminiscences are embodied in that vivid
and charming picture ‘The Englishman in Italy’, which appeared in the
‘Bells and Pomegranates’ number for the following year. Naples always
remained a bright spot in the poet’s memory; and if it had been, like
Asolo, his first experience of Italy, it must have drawn him in later
years the more powerfully of the two. At one period, indeed, he dreamed of
it as a home for his declining days.

Chapter 9

1844-1849

Introduction to Miss Barrett—Engagement—Motives for Secrecy—Marriage—Journey
to Italy—Extract of Letter from Mr. Fox—Mrs. Browning’s
Letters to Miss Mitford—Life at Pisa—Vallombrosa—Florence;
Mr. Powers; Miss Boyle—Proposed British Mission to the Vatican—Father
Prout—Palazzo Guidi—Fano; Ancona—’A Blot in the
‘Scutcheon’ at Sadler’s Wells.

During his recent intercourse with the Browning family Mr. Kenyon had
often spoken of his invalid cousin, Elizabeth Barrett,* and had given them
copies of her works; and when the poet returned to England, late in 1844,
he saw the volume containing ‘Lady Geraldine’s Courtship’, which had
appeared during his absence. On hearing him express his admiration of it,
Mr. Kenyon begged him to write to Miss Barrett, and himself tell her how
the poems had impressed him; ‘for,’ he added, ‘my cousin is a great
invalid, and sees no one, but great souls jump at sympathy.’ Mr. Browning
did write, and, a few months, probably, after the correspondence had been
established, begged to be allowed to visit her. She at first refused this,
on the score of her delicate health and habitual seclusion, emphasizing
the refusal by words of such touching humility and resignation that I
cannot refrain from quoting them. ‘There is nothing to see in me, nothing
to hear in me. I am a weed fit for the ground and darkness.’ But her
objections were overcome, and their first interview sealed Mr. Browning’s
fate.

There is no cause for surprize in the passionate admiration with which
Miss Barrett so instantly inspired him. To begin with, he was heart-whole.
It would be too much to affirm that, in the course of his thirty-two
years, he had never met with a woman whom he could entirely love; but if
he had, it was not under circumstances which favoured the growth of such a
feeling. She whom he now saw for the first time had long been to him one
of the greatest of living poets; she was learned as women seldom were in
those days. It must have been apparent, in the most fugitive contact, that
her moral nature was as exquisite as her mind was exceptional. She looked
much younger than her age, which he only recently knew to have been six
years beyond his own; and her face was filled with beauty by the large,
expressive eyes. The imprisoned love within her must unconsciously have
leapt to meet his own. It would have been only natural that he should grow
into the determination to devote his life to hers, or be swept into an
offer of marriage by a sudden impulse which his after-judgment would
condemn. Neither of these things occurred. The offer was indeed made under
a sudden and overmastering impulse. But it was persistently repeated, till
it had obtained a conditional assent. No sane man in Mr. Browning’s
position could have been ignorant of the responsibilities he was
incurring. He had, it is true, no experience of illness. Of its nature,
its treatment, its symptoms direct and indirect, he remained pathetically
ignorant to his dying day. He did not know what disqualifications for
active existence might reside in the fragile, recumbent form, nor in the
long years lived without change of air or scene beyond the passage, not
always even allowed, from bed-room to sitting-room, from sofa to bed
again. But he did know that Miss Barrett received him lying down, and that
his very ignorance of her condition left him without security for her ever
being able to stand. A strong sense of sympathy and pity could alone
entirely justify or explain his act—a strong desire to bring
sunshine into that darkened life. We might be sure that these motives had
been present with him if we had no direct authority for believing it; and
we have this authority in his own comparatively recent words: ‘She had so
much need of care and protection. There was so much pity in what I felt
for her!’ The pity was, it need hardly be said, at no time a substitute
for love, though the love in its full force only developed itself later;
but it supplied an additional incentive.

Miss Barrett had made her acceptance of Mr. Browning’s proposal contingent
on her improving in health. The outlook was therefore vague. But under the
influence of this great new happiness she did gain some degree of
strength. They saw each other three times a week; they exchanged letters
constantly, and a very deep and perfect understanding established itself
between them. Mr. Browning never mentioned his visits except to his own
family, because it was naturally feared that if Miss Barrett were known to
receive one person, other friends, or even acquaintances, would claim
admittance to her; and Mr. Kenyon, who was greatly pleased by the result
of his introduction, kept silence for the same reason.

In this way the months slipped by till the summer of 1846 was drawing to
its close, and Miss Barrett’s doctor then announced that her only chance
of even comparative recovery lay in spending the coming winter in the
South. There was no rational obstacle to her acting on this advice, since
more than one of her brothers was willing to escort her; but Mr. Barrett,
while surrounding his daughter with every possible comfort, had resigned
himself to her invalid condition and expected her also to acquiesce in it.
He probably did not believe that she would benefit by the proposed change.
At any rate he refused his consent to it. There remained to her only one
alternative—to break with the old home and travel southwards as Mr.
Browning’s wife.

When she had finally assented to this course, she took a preparatory step
which, in so far as it was known, must itself have been sufficiently
startling to those about her: she drove to Regent’s Park, and when there,
stepped out of the carriage and on to the grass. I do not know how long
she stood—probably only for a moment; but I well remember hearing
that when, after so long an interval, she felt earth under her feet and
air about her, the sensation was almost bewilderingly strange.

They were married, with strict privacy, on September 12, 1846, at St.
Pancras Church.

The engaged pair had not only not obtained Mr. Barrett’s sanction to their
marriage; they had not even invoked it; and the doubly clandestine
character thus forced upon the union could not be otherwise than repugnant
to Mr. Browning’s pride; but it was dictated by the deepest filial
affection on the part of his intended wife. There could be no question in
so enlightened a mind of sacrificing her own happiness with that of the
man she loved; she was determined to give herself to him. But she knew
that her father would never consent to her doing so; and she preferred
marrying without his knowledge to acting in defiance of a prohibition
which, once issued, he would never have revoked, and which would have
weighed like a portent of evil upon her. She even kept the secret of her
engagement from her intimate friend Miss Mitford, and her second father,
Mr. Kenyon, that they might not be involved in its responsibility. And Mr.
Kenyon, who, probably of all her circle, best understood the case, was
grateful to her for this consideration.

Mr. Barrett was one of those men who will not part with their children;
who will do anything for them except allow them to leave the parental
home. We have all known fathers of this type. He had nothing to urge
against Robert Browning. When Mr. Kenyon, later, said to him that he could
not understand his hostility to the marriage, since there was no man in
the world to whom he would more gladly have given his daughter if he had
been so fortunate as to possess one,* he replied: ‘I have no objection to
the young man, but my daughter should have been thinking of another
world;’ and, given his conviction that Miss Barrett’s state was hopeless,
some allowance must be made for the angered sense of fitness which her
elopement was calculated to arouse in him. But his attitude was the same,
under the varying circumstances, with all his daughters and sons alike.
There was no possible husband or wife whom he would cordially have
accepted for one of them.

Mr. Browning had been willing, even at that somewhat late age, to study
for the Bar, or accept, if he could obtain it, any other employment which
might render him less ineligible from a pecuniary point of view. But Miss
Barrett refused to hear of such a course; and the subsequent necessity for
her leaving England would have rendered it useless.

For some days after their marriage Mr. and Mrs. Browning returned to their
old life. He justly thought that the agitation of the ceremony had been,
for the moment, as much as she could endure, and had therefore fixed for
it a day prior by one week to that of their intended departure from
England. The only difference in their habits was that he did not see her;
he recoiled from the hypocrisy of asking for her under her maiden name;
and during this passive interval, fortunately short, he carried a weight
of anxiety and of depression which placed it among the most painful
periods of his existence.

In the late afternoon or evening of September 19, Mrs. Browning, attended
by her maid and her dog, stole away from her father’s house. The family
were at dinner, at which meal she was not in the habit of joining them;
her sisters Henrietta and Arabel had been throughout in the secret of her
attachment and in full sympathy with it; in the case of the servants, she
was also sure of friendly connivance. There was no difficulty in her
escape, but that created by the dog, which might be expected to bark its
consciousness of the unusual situation. She took him into her confidence.
She said: ‘O Flush, if you make a sound, I am lost.’ And Flush understood,
as what good dog would not?—and crept after his mistress in silence.
I do not remember where her husband joined her; we may be sure it was as
near her home as possible. That night they took the boat to Havre, on
their way to Paris.

Only a short time elapsed before Mr. Barrett became aware of what had
happened. It is not necessary to dwell on his indignation, which at that
moment, I believe, was shared by all his sons. Nor were they the only
persons to be agitated by the occurrence. If there was wrath in the
Barrett family, there was consternation in that of Mr. Browning. He had
committed a crime in the eyes of his wife’s father; but he had been
guilty, in the judgment of his own parents, of one of those errors which
are worse. A hundred times the possible advantages of marrying a Miss
Barrett could never have balanced for them the risks and dangers he had
incurred in wresting to himself the guardianship of that frail life which
might perish in his hands, leaving him to be accused of having destroyed
it; and they must have awaited the event with feelings never to be
forgotten.

It was soon to be apparent that in breaking the chains which bound her to
a sick room, Mr. Browning had not killed his wife, but was giving her a
new lease of existence. His parents and sister soon loved her dearly, for
her own sake as well as her husband’s; and those who, if in a mistaken
manner, had hitherto cherished her, gradually learned, with one exception,
to value him for hers. It would, however, be useless to deny that the
marriage was a hazardous experiment, involving risks of suffering quite
other than those connected with Mrs. Browning’s safety: the latent
practical disparities of an essentially vigorous and an essentially
fragile existence; and the time came when these were to make themselves
felt. Mrs. Browning had been a delicate infant. She had also outgrown this
delicacy and developed into a merry, and, in the harmless sense,
mischief-loving child. The accident which subsequently undermined her life
could only have befallen a very active and healthy girl.* Her condition
justified hope and, to a great extent, fulfilled it. She rallied
surprisingly and almost suddenly in the sunshine of her new life, and
remained for several years at the higher physical level: her natural and
now revived spirits sometimes, I imagine, lifting her beyond it. But her
ailments were too radical for permanent cure, as the weak voice and
shrunken form never ceased to attest. They renewed themselves, though in
slightly different conditions; and she gradually relapsed, during the
winters at least, into something like the home-bound condition of her
earlier days. It became impossible that she should share the more active
side of her husband’s existence. It had to be alternately suppressed and
carried on without her. The deep heart-love, the many-sided intellectual
sympathy, preserved their union in rare beauty to the end. But to say that
it thus maintained itself as if by magic, without effort of self-sacrifice
on his part or of resignation on hers, would be as unjust to the noble
qualities of both, as it would be false to assert that its compensating
happiness had ever failed them.

Mr. Browning’s troubles did not, even for the present, exhaust themselves
in that week of apprehension. They assumed a deeper reality when his
delicate wife first gave herself into his keeping, and the long hours on
steamboat and in diligence were before them. What she suffered in body,
and he in mind, during the first days of that wedding-journey is better
imagined than told. In Paris they either met, or were joined by, a friend,
Mrs. Anna Jameson (then also en route for Italy), and Mrs. Browning was
doubly cared for till she and her husband could once more put themselves
on their way. At Genoa came the long-needed rest in southern land. From
thence, in a few days, they went on to Pisa, and settled there for the
winter.

Even so great a friend as John Forster was not in the secret of Mr.
Browning’s marriage; we learn this through an amusing paragraph in a
letter from Mr. Fox, written soon after it had taken place:

‘Forster never heard of the Browning marriage till the proof of the
newspaper (‘Examiner’) notice was sent; when he went into one of his great
passions at the supposed hoax, ordered up the compositor to have a swear
at him, and demanded to see the MS. from which it was taken: so it was
brought, and he instantly recognised the hand of Browning’s sister. Next
day came a letter from R. B., saying he had often meant to tell him or
write of it, but hesitated between the two, and neglected both.

‘She was better, and a winter in Italy had been recommended some months
ago.

‘It seems as if made up by their poetry rather than themselves.’

Many interesting external details of Mr. Browning’s married life must have
been lost to us through the wholesale destruction of his letters to his
family, of which mention has been already made, and which he carried out
before leaving Warwick Crescent about four years ago; and Mrs. Browning’s
part in the correspondence, though still preserved, cannot fill the gap,
since for a long time it chiefly consisted of little personal outpourings,
inclosed in her husband’s letters and supplementary to them. But she also
wrote constantly to Miss Mitford; and, from the letters addressed to her,
now fortunately in Mr. Barrett Browning’s hands, it has been possible to
extract many passages of a sufficiently great, and not too private,
interest for our purpose. These extracts—in some cases almost entire
letters—indeed constitute a fairly complete record of Mr. and Mrs.
Browning’s joint life till the summer of 1854, when Miss Mitford’s death
was drawing near, and the correspondence ceased. Their chronological order
is not always certain, because Mrs. Browning never gave the year in which
her letters were written, and in some cases the postmark is obliterated;
but the missing date can almost always be gathered from their contents.
The first letter is probably written from Paris.

Oct. 2 (’46).

‘. . . and he, as you say, had done everything for me—he loved me
for reasons which had helped to weary me of myself—loved me heart to
heart persistently—in spite of my own will . . . drawn me back to
life and hope again when I had done with both. My life seemed to belong to
him and to none other, at last, and I had no power to speak a word. Have
faith in me, my dearest friend, till you know him. The intellect is so
little in comparison to all the rest—to the womanly tenderness, the
inexhaustible goodness, the high and noble aspiration of every hour.
Temper, spirits, manners—there is not a flaw anywhere. I shut my
eyes sometimes and fancy it all a dream of my guardian angel. Only, if it
had been a dream, the pain of some parts of it would have wakened me
before now—it is not a dream. . . .’

The three next speak for themselves.

Pisa: (’46).

‘. . . For Pisa, we both like it extremely. The city is full of beauty and
repose,—and the purple mountains gloriously seem to beckon us on
deeper into the vine land. We have rooms close to the Duomo, and leaning
down on the great Collegio built by Facini. Three excellent bed-rooms and
a sitting-room matted and carpeted, looking comfortable even for England.
For the last fortnight, except the last few sunny days, we have had rain;
but the climate is as mild as possible, no cold with all the damp.
Delightful weather we had for the travelling. Mrs. Jameson says she won’t
call me improved but transformed rather. . . . I mean to know something
about pictures some day. Robert does, and I shall get him to open my eyes
for me with a little instruction—in this place are to be seen the
first steps of Art. . . .’

Pisa: Dec. 19 (’46).

‘. . . Within these three or four days we have had frost—yes, and a
little snow—for the first time, say the Pisans, within five years.
Robert says the mountains are powdered towards Lucca. . . .’

Feb. 3 (’47).

‘. . . Robert is a warm admirer of Balzac and has read most of his books,
but certainly he does not in a general way appreciate our French people
quite with my warmth. He takes too high a standard, I tell him, and won’t
listen to a story for a story’s sake—I can bear, you know, to be
amused without a strong pull on my admiration. So we have great wars
sometimes—I put up Dumas’ flag or Soulie’s or Eugene Sue’s (yet he
was properly impressed by the ‘Mysteres de Paris’), and carry it till my
arms ache. The plays and vaudevilles he knows far more of than I do, and
always maintains they are the happiest growth of the French school.
Setting aside the ‘masters’, observe; for Balzac and George Sand hold all
their honours. Then we read together the other day ‘Rouge et Noir’, that
powerful work of Stendhal’s, and he observed that it was exactly like
Balzac ‘in the raw’—in the material and undeveloped conception . . .
We leave Pisa in April, and pass through Florence towards the north of
Italy . . .’

(She writes out a long list of the ‘Comedie Humaine’ for Miss Mitford.)

Mr. and Mrs. Browning must have remained in Florence, instead of merely
passing through it; this is proved by the contents of the two following
letters:

Aug. 20 (’47).

‘. . . We have spent one of the most delightful of summers notwithstanding
the heat, and I begin to comprehend the possibility of St. Lawrence’s
ecstasies on the gridiron. Very hot certainly it has been and is, yet
there have been cool intermissions, and as we have spacious and airy
rooms, as Robert lets me sit all day in my white dressing-gown without a
single masculine criticism, and as we can step out of the window on a sort
of balcony terrace which is quite private, and swims over with moonlight
in the evenings, and as we live upon water-melons and iced water and figs
and all manner of fruit, we bear the heat with an angelic patience.

We tried to make the monks of Vallombrosa let us stay with them for two
months, but the new abbot said or implied that Wilson and I stank in his
nostrils, being women. So we were sent away at the end of five days. So
provoking! Such scenery, such hills, such a sea of hills looking alive
among the clouds—which rolled, it was difficult to discern. Such
fine woods, supernaturally silent, with the ground black as ink. There
were eagles there too, and there was no road. Robert went on horseback,
and Wilson and I were drawn on a sledge—(i.e. an old hamper, a
basket wine-hamper—without a wheel) by two white bullocks, up the
precipitous mountains. Think of my travelling in those wild places at four
o’clock in the morning! a little frightened, dreadfully tired, but in an
ecstasy of admiration. It was a sight to see before one died and went away
into another world. But being expelled ignominiously at the end of five
days, we had to come back to Florence to find a new apartment cooler than
the old, and wait for dear Mr. Kenyon, and dear Mr. Kenyon does not come
after all. And on the 20th of September we take up our knapsacks and turn
our faces towards Rome, creeping slowly along, with a pause at Arezzo, and
a longer pause at Perugia, and another perhaps at Terni. Then we plan to
take an apartment we have heard of, over the Tarpeian rock, and enjoy Rome
as we have enjoyed Florence. More can scarcely be. This Florence is
unspeakably beautiful . . .’

Oct. (’47).

‘. . . Very few acquaintances have we made in Florence, and very quietly
lived out our days. Mr. Powers, the sculptor, is our chief friend and
favourite. A most charming, simple, straightforward, genial American—as
simple as the man of genius he has proved himself to be. He sometimes
comes to talk and take coffee with us, and we like him much. The sculptor
has eyes like a wild Indian’s, so black and full of light—you would
scarcely marvel if they clove the marble without the help of his hands. We
have seen, besides, the Hoppners, Lord Byron’s friends at Venice; and Miss
Boyle, a niece of the Earl of Cork, an authoress and poetess on her own
account, having been introduced to Robert in London at Lady Morgan’s, has
hunted us out, and paid us a visit. A very vivacious little person, with
sparkling talk enough . . .’

In this year, 1847, the question arose of a British mission to the
Vatican; and Mr. Browning wrote to Mr. Monckton Milnes begging him to
signify to the Foreign Office his more than willingness to take part in
it. He would be glad and proud, he said, to be secretary to such an
embassy, and to work like a horse in his vocation. The letter is given in
the lately published biography of Lord Houghton, and I am obliged to
confess that it has been my first intimation of the fact recorded there.
When once his ‘Paracelsus’ had appeared, and Mr. Browning had taken rank
as a poet, he renounced all idea of more active work; and the tone and
habits of his early married life would have seemed scarcely consistent
with a renewed impulse towards it. But the fact was in some sense due to
the very circumstances of that life: among them, his wife’s probable
incitement to, and certain sympathy with, the proceeding.

The projected winter in Rome had been given up, I believe against the
doctor’s advice, on the strength of the greater attractions of Florence.
Our next extract is dated from thence, Dec. 8, 1847.

‘. . . Think what we have done since I last wrote to you. Taken two
houses, that is, two apartments, each for six months, presigning the
contract. You will set it down to excellent poet’s work in the way of
domestic economy, but the fault was altogether mine, as usual. My husband,
to please me, took rooms which I could not be pleased with three days
through the absence of sunshine and warmth. The consequence was that we
had to pay heaps of guineas away, for leave to go away ourselves—any
alternative being preferable to a return of illness—and I am sure I
should have been ill if we had persisted in staying there. You can
scarcely fancy the wonderful difference which the sun makes in Italy. So
away we came into the blaze of him in the Piazza Pitti; precisely opposite
the Grand Duke’s palace; I with my remorse, and poor Robert without a
single reproach. Any other man, a little lower than the angels, would have
stamped and sworn a little for the mere relief of the thing—but as
to his being angry with me for any cause except not eating
enough dinner, the said sun would turn the wrong way first. So here we are
in the Pitti till April, in small rooms yellow with sunshine from morning
till evening, and most days I am able to get out into the piazza and walk
up and down for twenty minutes without feeling a breath of the actual
winter . . . and Miss Boyle, ever and anon, comes at night, at nine
o’clock, to catch us at hot chestnuts and mulled wine, and warm her feet
at our fire—and a kinder, more cordial little creature, full of
talent and accomplishment never had the world’s polish on it. Very amusing
she is too, and original; and a good deal of laughing she and Robert make
between them. And this is nearly all we see of the Face Divine—I
can’t make Robert go out a single evening. . . .’

We have five extracts for 1848. One of these, not otherwise dated,
describes an attack of sore-throat which was fortunately Mr. Browning’s
last; and the letter containing it must have been written in the course of
the summer.

‘. . . My husband was laid up for nearly a month with fever and relaxed
sore-throat. Quite unhappy I have been over those burning hands and
languid eyes—the only unhappiness I ever had by him. And then he
wouldn’t see a physician, and if it had not been that just at the right
moment Mr. Mahoney, the celebrated Jesuit, and “Father Prout” of Fraser,
knowing everything as those Jesuits are apt to do, came in to us on his
way to Rome, pointed out to us that the fever got ahead through weakness,
and mixed up with his own kind hand a potion of eggs and port wine; to the
horror of our Italian servant, who lifted up his eyes at such a
prescription for fever, crying, “O Inglesi! Inglesi!” the case would have
been far worse, I have no kind of doubt, for the eccentric prescription
gave the power of sleeping, and the pulse grew quieter directly. I shall
always be grateful to Father Prout—always.’*

May 28.

‘. . . And now I must tell you what we have done since I wrote last,
little thinking of doing so. You see our problem was, to get to England as
much in summer as possible, the expense of the intermediate journeys
making it difficult of solution. On examination of the whole case, it
appeared manifest that we were throwing money into the Arno, by our way of
taking furnished rooms, while to take an apartment and furnish it would
leave us a clear return of the furniture at the end of the first year in
exchange for our outlay, and all but a free residence afterwards, the
cheapness of furniture being quite fabulous at the present crisis. . . .
In fact we have really done it magnificently, and planted ourselves in the
Guidi Palace in the favourite suite of the last Count (his arms are in
scagliola on the floor of my bedroom). Though we have six beautiful rooms
and a kitchen, three of them quite palace rooms and opening on a terrace,
and though such furniture as comes by slow degrees into them is antique
and worthy of the place, we yet shall have saved money by the end of this
year. . . . Now I tell you all this lest you should hear dreadful rumours
of our having forsaken our native land, venerable institutions and all,
whereas we remember it so well (it’s a dear land in many senses), that we
have done this thing chiefly in order to make sure of getting back
comfortably, . . . a stone’s throw, too, it is from the Pitti, and really
in my present mind I would hardly exchange with the Grand Duke himself. By
the bye, as to street, we have no spectators in windows in just the grey
wall of a church called San Felice for good omen.

‘Now, have you heard enough of us? What I claimed first, in way of
privilege, was a spring-sofa to loll upon, and a supply of rain water to
wash in, and you shall see what a picturesque oil-jar they have given us
for the latter purpose; it would just hold the Captain of the Forty
Thieves. As for the chairs and tables, I yield the more especial interest
in them to Robert; only you would laugh to hear us correct one another
sometimes. “Dear, you get too many drawers, and not enough washing-stands.
Pray don’t let us have any more drawers when we’ve nothing more to put in
them.” There was no division on the necessity of having six spoons—some
questions passed themselves. . . .’

July.

‘. . . I am quite well again and strong. Robert and I go out often after
tea in a wandering walk to sit in the Loggia and look at the Perseus, or,
better still, at the divine sunsets on the Arno, turning it to pure gold
under the bridges. After more than twenty months of marriage, we are
happier than ever. . . .’

Aug.

‘. . . As for ourselves we have hardly done so well—yet well—having
enjoyed a great deal in spite of drawbacks. Murray, the traitor, sent us
to Fano as “a delightful summer residence for an English family,” and we
found it uninhabitable from the heat, vegetation scorched into paleness,
the very air swooning in the sun, and the gloomy looks of the inhabitants
sufficiently corroborative of their words that no drop of rain or dew ever
falls there during the summer. A “circulating library” which “does not
give out books,” and “a refined and intellectual Italian society” (I quote
Murray for that phrase) which “never reads a book through” (I quote Mrs.
Wiseman, Dr. Wiseman’s mother, who has lived in Fano seven years) complete
the advantages of the place. Yet the churches are very beautiful, and a
divine picture of Guercino’s is worth going all that way to see. . . . We
fled from Fano after three days, and finding ourselves cheated out of our
dream of summer coolness, resolved on substituting for it what the
Italians call “un bel giro”. So we went to Ancona—a striking sea
city, holding up against the brown rocks, and elbowing out the purple
tides—beautiful to look upon. An exfoliation of the rock itself you
would call the houses that seem to grow there—so identical is the
colour and character. I should like to visit Ancona again when there is a
little air and shadow. We stayed a week, as it was, living upon fish and
cold water. . . .’

The one dated Florence, December 16, is interesting with reference to Mr.
Browning’s attitude when he wrote the letters to Mr. Frank Hill which I
have recently quoted.

‘We have been, at least I have been, a little anxious lately about the
fate of the ‘Blot in the ‘Scutcheon’ which Mr. Phelps applied for my
husband’s permission to revive at Sadler’s. Of course putting the request
was mere form, as he had every right to act the play—only it made ME
anxious till we heard the result—and we both of us are very grateful
to dear Mr. Chorley, who not only made it his business to be at the
theatre the first night, but, before he slept, sat down like a true friend
to give us the story of the result, and never, he says, was a more
legitimate success. The play went straight to the hearts of the audience,
it seems, and we hear of its continuance on the stage, from the papers.
You may remember, or may not have heard, how Macready brought it out and
put his foot on it, in the flush of a quarrel between manager and author;
and Phelps, knowing the whole secret and feeling the power of the play,
determined on making a revival of it in his own theatre. Mr. Chorley
called his acting “fine”. . . .’

Chapter 10

1849-1852

Death of Mr. Browning’s Mother—Birth of his Son—Mrs.
Browning’s Letters continued—Baths of Lucca—Florence again—Venice—Margaret
Fuller Ossoli—Visit to England—Winter in Paris—Carlyle—George
Sand—Alfred de Musset.

On March 9, 1849, Mr. Browning’s son was born. With the joy of his wife’s
deliverance from the dangers of such an event came also his first great
sorrow. His mother did not live to receive the news of her grandchild’s
birth. The letter which conveyed it found her still breathing, but in the
unconsciousness of approaching death. There had been no time for warning.
The sister could only break the suddenness of the shock. A letter of Mrs.
Browning’s tells what was to be told.

Florence: April 30 (’49).

‘. . . This is the first packet of letters, except one to Wimpole Street,
which I have written since my confinement. You will have heard how our joy
turned suddenly into deep sorrow by the death of my husband’s mother. An
unsuspected disease (ossification of the heart) terminated in a fatal way—and
she lay in the insensibility precursive of the grave’s when the letter
written with such gladness by my poor husband and announcing the birth of
his child, reached her address. “It would have made her heart bound,” said
her daughter to us. Poor tender heart—the last throb was too near.
The medical men would not allow the news to be communicated. The next joy
she felt was to be in heaven itself. My husband has been in the deepest
anguish, and indeed, except for the courageous consideration of his sister
who wrote two letters of preparation, saying “She was not well” and she
“was very ill” when in fact all was over, I am frightened to think what
the result would have been to him. He has loved his mother as such
passionate natures only can love, and I never saw a man so bowed down in
an extremity of sorrow—never. Even now, the depression is great—and
sometimes when I leave him alone a little and return to the room, I find
him in tears. I do earnestly wish to change the scene and air—but
where to go? England looks terrible now. He says it would break his heart
to see his mother’s roses over the wall and the place where she used to
lay her scissors and gloves—which I understand so thoroughly that I
can’t say “Let us go to England.” We must wait and see what his father and
sister will choose to do, or choose us to do—for of course a duty
plainly seen would draw us anywhere. My own dearest sisters will be
painfully disappointed by any change of plan—only they are too good
and kind not to understand the difficulty—not to see the motive. So
do you, I am certain. It has been very, very painful altogether, this
drawing together of life and death. Robert was too enraptured at my safety
and with his little son, and the sudden reaction was terrible. . . .’

Bagni di Lucca.

‘. . . We have been wandering in search of cool air and a cool bough among
all the olive trees to build our summer nest on. My husband has been
suffering beyond what one could shut one’s eyes to, in consequence of the
great mental shock of last March—loss of appetite, loss of sleep—looks
quite worn and altered. His spirits never rallied except with an effort,
and every letter from New Cross threw him back into deep depression. I was
very anxious, and feared much that the end of it all would be (the intense
heat of Florence assisting) nervous fever or something similar; and I had
the greatest difficulty in persuading him to leave Florence for a month or
two. He who generally delights in travelling, had no mind for change or
movement. I had to say and swear that Baby and I couldn’t bear the heat,
and that we must and would go away. “Ce que femme veut, homme
veut,” if the latter is at all amiable, or the former persevering. At last
I gained the victory. It was agreed that we two should go on an exploring
journey, to find out where we could have most shadow at least expense; and
we left our child with his nurse and Wilson, while we were absent. We went
along the coast to Spezzia, saw Carrara with the white marble mountains,
passed through the olive-forests and the vineyards, avenues of acacia
trees, chestnut woods, glorious surprises of the most exquisite scenery. I
say olive-forests advisedly—the olive grows like a forest-tree in
those regions, shading the ground with tints of silvery network. The olive
near Florence is but a shrub in comparison, and I have learnt to despise a
little too the Florentine vine, which does not swing such portcullises of
massive dewy green from one tree to another as along the whole road where
we travelled. Beautiful indeed it was. Spezzia wheels the blue sea into
the arms of the wooded mountains; and we had a glance at Shelley’s house
at Lerici. It was melancholy to me, of course. I was not sorry that the
lodgings we inquired about were far above our means. We returned on our
steps (after two days in the dirtiest of possible inns), saw Seravezza, a
village in the mountains, where rock river and wood enticed us to stay,
and the inhabitants drove us off by their unreasonable prices. It is
curious—but just in proportion to the want of civilization the
prices rise in Italy. If you haven’t cups and saucers, you are made to pay
for plate. Well—so finding no rest for the soles of our feet, I
persuaded Robert to go to the Baths of Lucca, only to see them. We were to
proceed afterwards to San Marcello, or some safer wilderness. We had both
of us, but he chiefly, the strongest prejudice against the Baths of Lucca;
taking them for a sort of wasp’s nest of scandal and gaming, and expecting
to find everything trodden flat by the continental English—yet, I
wanted to see the place, because it is a place to see, after all. So we
came, and were so charmed by the exquisite beauty of the scenery, by the
coolness of the climate, and the absence of our countrymen—political
troubles serving admirably our private requirements, that we made an offer
for rooms on the spot, and returned to Florence for Baby and the rest of
our establishment without further delay. Here we are then. We have been
here more than a fortnight. We have taken an apartment for the season—four
months, paying twelve pounds for the whole term, and hoping to be able to
stay till the end of October. The living is cheaper than even in Florence,
so that there has been no extravagance in coming here. In fact Florence is
scarcely tenable during the summer from the excessive heat by day and
night, even if there were no particular motive for leaving it. We have
taken a sort of eagle’s nest in this place—the highest house of the
highest of the three villages which are called the Bagni di Lucca, and
which lie at the heart of a hundred mountains sung to continually by a
rushing mountain stream. The sound of the river and of the cicale is all
the noise we hear. Austrian drums and carriage-wheels cannot vex us, God
be thanked for it! The silence is full of joy and consolation. I think my
husband’s spirits are better already, and his appetite improved. Certainly
little Babe’s great cheeks are growing rosier and rosier. He is out all
day when the sun is not too strong, and Wilson will have it that he is
prettier than the whole population of babies here. . . . Then my whole
strength has wonderfully improved—just as my medical friends
prophesied,—and it seems like a dream when I find myself able to
climb the hills with Robert, and help him to lose himself in the forests.
Ever since my confinement I have been growing stronger and stronger, and
where it is to stop I can’t tell really. I can do as much or more than at
any point of my life since I arrived at woman’s estate. The air of the
place seems to penetrate the heart, and not the lungs only: it draws you,
raises you, excites you. Mountain air without its keenness—sheathed
in Italian sunshine—think what that must be! And the beauty and the
solitude—for with a few paces we get free of the habitations of men—all
is delightful to me. What is peculiarly beautiful and wonderful, is the
variety of the shapes of the mountains. They are a multitude—and yet
there is no likeness. None, except where the golden mist comes and
transfigures them into one glory. For the rest, the mountain there wrapt
in the chestnut forest is not like that bare peak which tilts against the
sky—nor like the serpent-twine of another which seems to move and
coil in the moving coiling shadow. . . .’

She writes again:

Bagni di Lucca: Oct. 2 (’49).

‘. . . I have performed a great exploit—ridden on a donkey five
miles deep into the mountain, to an almost inaccessible volcanic ground
not far from the stars. Robert on horseback, and Wilson and the nurse
(with Baby) on other donkies,—guides of course. We set off at eight
in the morning, and returned at six P.M. after dining on the mountain
pinnacle, I dreadfully tired, but the child laughing as usual, burnt brick
colour for all bad effect. No horse or ass untrained for the mountains
could have kept foot a moment where we penetrated, and even as it was, one
could not help the natural thrill. No road except the bed of exhausted
torrents—above and through the chestnut forests precipitous beyond
what you would think possible for ascent or descent. Ravines tearing the
ground to pieces under your feet. The scenery, sublime and wonderful,
satisfied us wholly, as we looked round on the world of innumerable
mountains, bound faintly with the grey sea—and not a human
habitation. . . .’

The following fragment, which I have received quite without date, might
refer to this or to a somewhat later period.

‘If he is vain about anything in the world it is about my improved health,
and I say to him, “But you needn’t talk so much to people, of how your
wife walked here with you, and there with you, as if a wife with a pair of
feet was a miracle of nature.”‘

Florence: Feb. 18 (’50).

‘. . . You can scarcely imagine to yourself the retired life we live, and
how we have retreated from the kind advances of the English society here.
Now people seem to understand that we are to be left alone. . . .’

Florence: April 1 (’50).

‘. . . We drive day by day through the lovely Cascine, just sweeping
through the city. Just such a window where Bianca Capello looked out to
see the Duke go by—and just such a door where Tasso stood and where
Dante drew his chair out to sit. Strange to have all that old world life
about us, and the blue sky so bright. . . .’

Venice: June 4 (probably ’50).

‘. . . I have been between Heaven and Earth since our arrival at Venice.
The Heaven of it is ineffable—never had I touched the skirts of so
celestial a place. The beauty of the architecture, the silver trails of
water up between all that gorgeous colour and carving, the enchanting
silence, the music, the gondolas—I mix it all up together and
maintain that nothing is like it, nothing equal to it, not a second Venice
in the world.

‘Do you know when I came first I felt as if I never could go away. But now
comes the earth-side.

‘Robert, after sharing the ecstasy, grows uncomfortable and nervous,
unable to eat or sleep, and poor Wilson still worse, in a miserable
condition of sickness and headache. Alas for these mortal Venices, so
exquisite and so bilious. Therefore I am constrained away from my joys by
sympathy, and am forced to be glad that we are going away on Friday. For
myself, it did not affect me at all. Take the mild, soft, relaxing climate—even
the scirocco does not touch me. And the baby grows gloriously fatter in
spite of everything. . . . As for Venice, you can’t get even a “Times”,
much less an “Athenaeum”. We comfort ourselves by taking a box at the
opera (a whole box on the grand tier, mind) for two shillings and
eightpence, English. Also, every evening at half-past eight, Robert and I
are sitting under the moon in the great piazza of St. Mark, taking
excellent coffee and reading the French papers.’

If it were possible to draw more largely on Mrs. Browning’s correspondence
for this year, it would certainly supply the record of her intimacy, and
that of her husband, with Margaret Fuller Ossoli. A warm attachment sprang
up between them during that lady’s residence in Florence. Its last
evenings were all spent at their house; and, soon after she had bidden
them farewell, she availed herself of a two days’ delay in the departure
of the ship to return from Leghorn and be with them one evening more. She
had what seemed a prophetic dread of the voyage to America, though she
attached no superstitious importance to the prediction once made to her
husband that he would be drowned; and learned when it was too late to
change her plans that her presence there was, after all, unnecessary. Mr.
Browning was deeply affected by the news of her death by shipwreck, which
took place on July 16, 1850; and wrote an account of his acquaintance with
her, for publication by her friends. This also, unfortunately, was lost.
Her son was of the same age as his, little more than a year old; but she
left a token of the friendship which might some day have united them, in a
small Bible inscribed to the baby Robert, ‘In memory of Angelo Ossoli.’

The intended journey to England was delayed for Mr. Browning by the
painful associations connected with his mother’s death; but in the summer
of 1851 he found courage to go there: and then, as on each succeeding
visit paid to London with his wife, he commemorated his marriage in a
manner all his own. He went to the church in which it had been solemnized,
and kissed the paving-stones in front of the door. It needed all this love
to comfort Mrs. Browning in the estrangement from her father which was
henceforth to be accepted as final. He had held no communication with her
since her marriage, and she knew that it was not forgiven; but she had
cherished a hope that he would so far relent towards her as to kiss her
child, even if he would not see her. Her prayer to this effect remained,
however, unanswered.

In the autumn they proceeded to Paris; whence Mrs. Browning wrote, October
22 and November 12.

138, Avenue des Champs Elysees.

‘. . . It was a long time before we could settle ourselves in a private
apartment. . . . At last we came off to these Champs Elysees, to a very
pleasant apartment, the window looking over a large terrace (almost large
enough to serve the purpose of a garden) to the great drive and promenade
of the Parisians when they come out of the streets to sun and shade and
show themselves off among the trees. A pretty little dining-room, a
writing and dressing-room for Robert beside it, a drawing-room beyond
that, with two excellent bedrooms, and third bedroom for a “femme de
menage”, kitchen, &c. . . . So this answers all requirements, and the
sun suns us loyally as in duty bound considering the southern aspect, and
we are glad to find ourselves settled for six months. We have had lovely
weather, and have seen a fire only yesterday for the first time since we
left England. . . . We have seen nothing in Paris, except the shell of it.
Yet, two evenings ago we hazarded going to a reception at Lady Elgin’s, in
the Faubourg St. Germain, and saw some French, but nobody of distinction.

‘It is a good house, I believe, and she has an earnest face which must
mean something. We were invited to go every Monday between eight and
twelve. We go on Friday to Madame Mohl’s, where we are to have some of the
“celebrites”. . . . Carlyle, for instance, I liked infinitely more in his
personality than I expected to like him, and I saw a great deal of him,
for he travelled with us to Paris, and spent several evenings with us, we
three together. He is one of the most interesting men I could imagine,
even deeply interesting to me; and you come to understand perfectly when
you know him, that his bitterness is only melancholy, and his scorn,
sensibility. Highly picturesque, too, he is in conversation; the talk of
writing men is very seldom so good.

‘And, do you know, I was much taken, in London, with a young authoress,
Geraldine Jewsbury. You have read her books. . . . She herself is quiet
and simple, and drew my heart out of me a good deal. I felt inclined to
love her in our half-hour’s intercourse. . . .’

138, Avenue des Champs Elysees: (Nov. 12).

‘. . . Robert’s father and sister have been paying us a visit during the
last three weeks. They are very affectionate to me, and I love them for
his sake and their own, and am very sorry at the thought of losing them,
as we are on the point of doing. We hope, however, to establish them in
Paris, if we can stay, and if no other obstacle should arise before the
spring, when they must leave Hatcham. Little Wiedemann ‘draws’, as you may
suppose . . . he is adored by his grandfather, and then, Robert! They are
an affectionate family, and not easy when removed one from another. . . .’

On their journey from London to Paris, Mr. and Mrs. Browning had been
joined by Carlyle; and it afterwards struck Mr. Browning as strange that,
in the ‘Life’ of Carlyle, their companionship on this occasion should be
spoken of as the result of a chance meeting. Carlyle not only went to
Paris with the Brownings, but had begged permission to do so; and Mrs.
Browning had hesitated to grant this because she was afraid her little boy
would be tiresome to him. Her fear, however, proved mistaken. The child’s
prattle amused the philosopher, and led him on one occasion to say: ‘Why,
sir, you have as many aspirations as Napoleon!’ At Paris he would have
been miserable without Mr. Browning’s help, in his ignorance of the
language, and impatience of the discomforts which this created for him. He
couldn’t ask for anything, he complained, but they brought him the
opposite.

On one occasion Mr. Carlyle made a singular remark. He was walking with
Mr. Browning, either in Paris or the neighbouring country, when they
passed an image of the Crucifixion; and glancing towards the figure of
Christ, he said, with his deliberate Scotch utterance, ‘Ah, poor fellow,
your part is played out!’

Two especially interesting letters are dated from the same address,
February 15 and April 7, 1852.

‘. . . Beranger lives close to us, and Robert has seen him in his white
hat, wandering along the asphalte. I had a notion, somehow, that he was
very old, but he is only elderly—not much above sixty (which is the
prime of life, nowadays) and he lives quietly and keeps out of scrapes
poetical and political, and if Robert and I had a little less modesty we
are assured that we should find access to him easy. But we can’t make up
our minds to go to his door and introduce ourselves as vagrant minstrels,
when he may probably not know our names. We could never follow the fashion
of certain authors, who send their books about with intimations of their
being likely to be acceptable or not—of which practice poor Tennyson
knows too much for his peace. If, indeed, a letter of introduction to
Beranger were vouchsafed to us from any benign quarter, we should both be
delighted, but we must wait patiently for the influence of the stars.
Meanwhile, we have at last sent our letter [Mazzini’s] to George Sand,
accompanied with a little note signed by both of us, though written by me,
as seemed right, being the woman. We half-despaired in doing this—for
it is most difficult, it appears, to get at her, she having taken vows
against seeing strangers, in consequence of various annoyances and
persecutions, in and out of print, which it’s the mere instinct of a woman
to avoid—I can understand it perfectly. Also, she is in Paris for
only a few days, and under a new name, to escape from the plague of her
notoriety. People said, “She will never see you—you have no chance,
I am afraid.” But we determined to try. At least I pricked Robert up to
the leap—for he was really inclined to sit in his chair and be proud
a little. “No,” said I, “you sha’n’t be proud, and I won’t
be proud, and we will see her—I won’t die, if I can help it,
without seeing George Sand.” So we gave our letter to a friend, who was to
give it to a friend who was to place it in her hands—her abode being
a mystery, and the name she used unknown. The next day came by the post
this answer:

‘”Madame, j’aurai l’honneur de vous recevoir Dimanche prochain, rue
Racine, 3. C’est le seul jour que je puisse passer chez moi; et encore je
n’en suis pas absolument certaine—mais je ferai tellement mon
possible, que ma bonne etoile m’y aidera peut-etre un peu. Agreez mille
remerciments de coeur ainsi que Monsieur Browning, que j’espere voir avec
vous, pour la sympathie que vous m’accordez. George Sand. Paris: 12
fevrier ’52.”

‘This is graceful and kind, is it not?—and we are going to-morrow—I,
rather at the risk of my life, but I shall roll myself up head and all in
a thick shawl, and we shall go in a close carriage, and I hope I shall be
able to tell you the result before shutting up this letter.

‘Monday.—I have seen G. S. She received us in a room with a bed in
it, the only room she has to occupy, I suppose, during her short stay in
Paris. She received us very cordially with her hand held out, which I, in
the emotion of the moment, stooped and kissed—upon which she
exclaimed, “Mais non! je ne veux pas,” and kissed me. I don’t think she is
a great deal taller than I am,—yes, taller, but not a great deal—and
a little over-stout for that height. The upper part of the face is fine,
the forehead, eyebrows and eyes—dark glowing eyes as they should be;
the lower part not so good. The beautiful teeth project a little, flashing
out the smile of the large characteristic mouth, and the chin recedes. It
never could have been a beautiful face Robert and I agree, but noble and
expressive it has been and is. The complexion is olive, quite without
colour; the hair, black and glossy, divided with evident care and twisted
back into a knot behind the head, and she wore no covering to it. Some of
the portraits represent her in ringlets, and ringlets would be much more
becoming to the style of face, I fancy, for the cheeks are rather
over-full. She was dressed in a sort of woollen grey gown, with a jacket
of the same material (according to the ruling fashion), the gown fastened
up to the throat, with a small linen collarette, and plain white muslin
sleeves buttoned round the wrists. The hands offered to me were small and
well-shaped. Her manners were quite as simple as her costume. I never saw
a simpler woman. Not a shade of affectation or consciousness, even—not
a suffusion of coquetry, not a cigarette to be seen! Two or three young
men were sitting with her, and I observed the profound respect with which
they listened to every word she said. She spoke rapidly, with a low,
unemphatic voice. Repose of manner is much more her characteristic than
animation is—only, under all the quietness, and perhaps by means of
it, you are aware of an intense burning soul. She kissed me again when we
went away. . . .’

‘April 7.—George Sand we came to know a great deal more of. I think
Robert saw her six times. Once he met her near the Tuileries, offered her
his arm and walked with her the whole length of the gardens. She was not
on that occasion looking as well as usual, being a little too much
“endimanchee” in terrestrial lavenders and super-celestial blues—not,
in fact, dressed with the remarkable taste which he has seen in her at
other times. Her usual costume is both pretty and quiet, and the
fashionable waistcoat and jacket (which are respectable in all the
“Ladies’ Companions” of the day) make the only approach to masculine
wearings to be observed in her.

‘She has great nicety and refinement in her personal ways, I think—and
the cigarette is really a feminine weapon if properly understood.

‘Ah! but I didn’t see her smoke. I was unfortunate. I could only go with
Robert three times to her house, and once she was out. He was really very
good and kind to let me go at all after he found the sort of society
rampant around her. He didn’t like it extremely, but being the prince of
husbands, he was lenient to my desires, and yielded the point. She seems
to live in the abomination of desolation, as far as regards society—crowds
of ill-bred men who adore her, ‘a genoux bas’, betwixt a puff of smoke and
an ejection of saliva—society of the ragged red, diluted with the
low theatrical. She herself so different, so apart, so alone in her
melancholy disdain. I was deeply interested in that poor woman. I felt a
profound compassion for her. I did not mind much even the Greek, in Greek
costume, who ‘tutoyed’ her, and kissed her I believe, so Robert said—or
the other vulgar man of the theatre, who went down on his knees and called
her “sublime”. “Caprice d’amitie,” said she with her quiet, gentle scorn.
A noble woman under the mud, be certain. I would kneel down to her,
too, if she would leave it all, throw it off, and be herself as God made
her. But she would not care for my kneeling—she does not care for
me. Perhaps she doesn’t care much for anybody by this time, who knows? She
wrote one or two or three kind notes to me, and promised to ‘venir
m’embrasser’ before she left Paris, but she did not come. We both tried
hard to please her, and she told a friend of ours that she “liked us”.
Only we always felt that we couldn’t penetrate—couldn’t really touch
her—it was all vain.

‘Alfred de Musset was to have been at M. Buloz’ where Robert was a week
ago, on purpose to meet him, but he was prevented in some way. His
brother, Paul de Musset, a very different person, was there instead, but
we hope to have Alfred on another occasion. Do you know his poems? He is
not capable of large grasps, but he has poet’s life and blood in him, I
assure you. . . . We are expecting a visit from Lamartine, who does a
great deal of honour to both of us in the way of appreciation, and was
kind enough to propose to come. I will tell you all about it.’

Mr. Browning fully shared his wife’s impression of a want of frank
cordiality on George Sand’s part; and was especially struck by it in
reference to himself, with whom it seemed more natural that she should
feel at ease. He could only imagine that his studied courtesy towards her
was felt by her as a rebuke to the latitude which she granted to other
men.

Another eminent French writer whom he much wished to know was Victor Hugo,
and I am told that for years he carried about him a letter of introduction
from Lord Houghton, always hoping for an opportunity of presenting it. The
hope was not fulfilled, though, in 1866, Mr. Browning crossed to Saint
Malo by the Channel Islands and spent three days in Jersey.

Chapter 11

1852-1855

M. Joseph Milsand—His close Friendship with Mr. Browning; Mrs.
Browning’s Impression of him—New Edition of Mr. Browning’s Poems—’Christmas
Eve and Easter Day’—’Essay’ on Shelley—Summer in London—Dante
Gabriel Rossetti—Florence; secluded Life—Letters from Mr. and
Mrs. Browning—’Colombe’s Birthday’—Baths of Lucca—Mrs.
Browning’s Letters—Winter in Rome—Mr. and Mrs. Story—Mrs.
Sartoris—Mrs. Fanny Kemble—Summer in London—Tennyson—Ruskin.

It was during this winter in Paris that Mr. Browning became acquainted
with M. Joseph Milsand, the second Frenchman with whom he was to be united
by ties of deep friendship and affection. M. Milsand was at that time, and
for long afterwards, a frequent contributor to the ‘Revue des Deux
Mondes’; his range of subjects being enlarged by his, for a Frenchman,
exceptional knowledge of English life, language, and literature. He wrote
an article on Quakerism, which was much approved by Mr. William Forster,
and a little volume on Ruskin called ‘L’Esthetique Anglaise’, which was
published in the ‘Bibliotheque de Philosophie Contemporaine’.* Shortly
before the arrival of Mr. and Mrs. Browning in Paris, he had accidentally
seen an extract from ‘Paracelsus’. This struck him so much that he
procured the two volumes of the works and ‘Christmas Eve’, and discussed
the whole in the ‘Revue’ as the second part of an essay entitled ‘La
Poesie Anglaise depuis Byron’. Mr. Browning saw the article, and was
naturally touched at finding his poems the object of serious study in a
foreign country, while still so little regarded in his own. It was no less
natural that this should lead to a friendship which, the opening once
given, would have grown up unassisted, at least on Mr. Browning’s side;
for M. Milsand united the qualities of a critical intellect with a
tenderness, a loyalty, and a simplicity of nature seldom found in
combination with them.

The introduction was brought about by the daughter of William Browning,
Mrs. Jebb-Dyke, or more directly by Mr. and Mrs. Fraser Corkran, who were
among the earliest friends of the Browning family in Paris. M. Milsand was
soon an ‘habitue’ of Mr. Browning’s house, as somewhat later of that of
his father and sister; and when, many years afterwards, Miss Browning had
taken up her abode in England, he spent some weeks of the early summer in
Warwick Crescent, whenever his home duties or personal occupations allowed
him to do so. Several times also the poet and his sister joined him at
Saint-Aubin, the seaside village in Normandy which was his special resort,
and where they enjoyed the good offices of Madame Milsand, a home-staying,
genuine French wife and mother, well acquainted with the resources of its
very primitive life. M. Milsand died, in 1886, of apoplexy, the
consequence, I believe, of heart-disease brought on by excessive
cold-bathing. The first reprint of ‘Sordello’, in 1863, had been, as is
well known, dedicated to him. The ‘Parleyings’, published within a year of
his death, were inscribed to his memory. Mr. Browning’s affection for him
finds utterance in a few strong words which I shall have occasion to
quote. An undated fragment concerning him from Mrs. Browning to her
sister-in-law, points to a later date than the present, but may as well be
inserted here.

‘. . . I quite love M. Milsand for being interested in Penini. What a
perfect creature he is, to be sure! He always stands in the top place
among our gods—Give him my cordial regards, always, mind. . . . He
wants, I think—the only want of that noble nature—the sense of
spiritual relation; and also he puts under his feet too much the worth of
impulse and passion, in considering the powers of human nature. For the
rest, I don’t know such a man. He has intellectual conscience—or say—the
conscience of the intellect, in a higher degree than I ever saw in any man
of any country—and this is no less Robert’s belief than mine. When
we hear the brilliant talkers and noisy thinkers here and there and
everywhere, we go back to Milsand with a real reverence. Also, I never
shall forget his delicacy to me personally, nor his tenderness of heart
about my child. . . .’

The criticism was inevitable from the point of view of Mrs. Browning’s
nature and experience; but I think she would have revoked part of it if
she had known M. Milsand in later years. He would never have agreed with
her as to the authority of ‘impulse and passion’, but I am sure he did not
underrate their importance as factors in human life.

M. Milsand was one of the few readers of Browning with whom I have talked
about him, who had studied his work from the beginning, and had realized
the ambition of his first imaginative flights. He was more perplexed by
the poet’s utterance in later years. ‘Quel homme extraordinaire!’ he once
said to me; ‘son centre n’est pas au milieu.’ The usual criticism would
have been that, while his own centre was in the middle, he did not seek it
in the middle for the things of which he wrote; but I remember that, at
the moment in which the words were spoken, they impressed me as full of
penetration. Mr. Browning had so much confidence in M. Milsand’s
linguistic powers that he invariably sent him his proof-sheets for final
revision, and was exceedingly pleased with such few corrections as his
friend was able to suggest.

With the name of Milsand connects itself in the poet’s life that of a
younger, but very genuine friend of both, M. Gustave Dourlans: a man of
fine critical and intellectual powers, unfortunately neutralized by bad
health. M. Dourlans also became a visitor at Warwick Crescent, and a
frequent correspondent of Mr. or rather of Miss Browning. He came from
Paris once more, to witness the last sad scene in Westminster Abbey.

The first three years of Mr. Browning’s married life had been unproductive
from a literary point of view. The realization and enjoyment of the new
companionship, the duties as well as interests of the dual existence, and,
lastly, the shock and pain of his mother’s death, had absorbed his mental
energies for the time being. But by the close of 1848 he had prepared for
publication in the following year a new edition of ‘Paracelsus’ and the
‘Bells and Pomegranates’ poems. The reprint was in two volumes, and the
publishers were Messrs. Chapman and Hall; the system, maintained through
Mr. Moxon, of publication at the author’s expense, being abandoned by Mr.
Browning when he left home. Mrs. Browning writes of him on this occasion
that he is paying ‘peculiar attention to the objections made against
certain obscurities.’ He himself prefaced the edition by these words:
‘Many of these pieces were out of print, the rest had been withdrawn from
circulation, when the corrected edition, now submitted to the reader, was
prepared. The various Poems and Dramas have received the author’s most
careful revision. December 1848.’

In 1850, in Florence, he wrote ‘Christmas Eve and Easter Day’; and in
December 1851, in Paris, the essay on Shelley, to be prefixed to
twenty-five supposed letters of that poet, published by Moxon in 1852.*

The reading of this Essay might serve to correct the frequent
misapprehension of Mr. Browning’s religious views which has been based on
the literal evidence of ‘Christmas Eve’, were it not that its companion
poem has failed to do so; though the tendency of ‘Easter Day’ is as
different from that of its precursor as their common Christianity admits.
The balance of argument in ‘Christmas Eve’ is in favour of direct
revelation of religious truth and prosaic certainty regarding it; while
the ‘Easter Day’ vision makes a tentative and unresting attitude the first
condition of the religious life; and if Mr. Browning has meant to say—as
he so often did say—that religious certainties are required for the
undeveloped mind, but that the growing religious intelligence walks best
by a receding light, he denies the positive basis of Christian belief, and
is no more orthodox in the one set of reflections than in the other. The
spirit, however, of both poems is ascetic: for the first divorces
religious worship from every appeal to the poetic sense; the second
refuses to recognize, in poetry or art, or the attainments of the
intellect, or even in the best human love, any practical correspondence
with religion. The dissertation on Shelley is, what ‘Sordello’ was, what
its author’s treatment of poets and poetry always must be—an
indirect vindication of the conceptions of human life which ‘Christmas Eve
and Easter Day’ condemns. This double poem stands indeed so much alone in
Mr. Browning’s work that we are tempted to ask ourselves to what
circumstance or impulse, external or internal, it has been due; and we can
only conjecture that the prolonged communion with a mind so spiritual as
that of his wife, the special sympathies and differences which were
elicited by it, may have quickened his religious imagination, while
directing it towards doctrinal or controversial issues which it had not
previously embraced.

The ‘Essay’ is a tribute to the genius of Shelley; it is also a
justification of his life and character, as the balance of evidence then
presented them to Mr. Browning’s mind. It rests on a definition of the
respective qualities of the objective and the subjective poet. . . . While
both, he says, are gifted with the fuller perception of nature and man,
the one endeavours to

‘reproduce things external (whether the phenomena of the scenic universe,
or the manifested action of the human heart and brain) with an immediate
reference, in every case, to the common eye and apprehension of his
fellow-men, assumed capable of receiving and profiting by this
reproduction’—the other ‘is impelled to embody the thing he
perceives, not so much with reference to the many below, as to the One
above him, the supreme Intelligence which apprehends all things in their
absolute truth,—an ultimate view ever aspired to, if but partially
attained, by the poet’s own soul. Not what man sees, but what God sees—the
‘Ideas’ of Plato, seeds of creation lying burningly on the Divine Hand—it
is toward these that he struggles. Not with the combination of humanity in
action, but with the primal elements of humanity he has to do; and he digs
where he stands,—preferring to seek them in his own soul as the
nearest reflex of that absolute Mind, according to the intuitions of which
he desires to perceive and speak.’

The objective poet is therefore a fashioner, the subjective is best
described as a seer. The distinction repeats itself in the interest with
which we study their respective lives. We are glad of the biography of the
objective poet because it reveals to us the power by which he works; we
desire still more that of the subjective poet, because it presents us with
another aspect of the work itself. The poetry of such a one is an
effluence much more than a production; it is

‘the very radiance and aroma of his personality, projected from it but not
separated. Therefore, in our approach to the poetry, we necessarily
approach the personality of the poet; in apprehending it we apprehend him,
and certainly we cannot love it without loving him.’

The reason of Mr. Browning’s prolonged and instinctive reverence for
Shelley is thus set forth in the opening pages of the Essay: he recognized
in his writings the quality of a ‘subjective’ poet; hence, as he
understands the word, the evidence of a divinely inspired man.

Mr. Browning goes on to say that we need the recorded life in order quite
to determine to which class of inspiration a given work belongs; and
though he regards the work of Shelley as carrying its warrant within
itself, his position leaves ample room for a withdrawal of faith, a
reversal of judgment, if the ascertained facts of the poet’s life should
at any future time bear decided witness against him. He is also careful to
avoid drawing too hard and fast a line between the two opposite kinds of
poet. He admits that a pure instance of either is seldom to be found; he
sees no reason why

‘these two modes of poetic faculty may not issue hereafter from the same
poet in successive perfect works. . . . A mere running-in of the one
faculty upon the other’ being, meanwhile, ‘the ordinary circumstance.’

I venture, however, to think, that in his various and necessary
concessions, he lets slip the main point; and for the simple reason that
it is untenable. The terms ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ denote a real and
very important difference on the ground of judgment, but one which tends
more and more to efface itself in the sphere of the higher creative
imagination. Mr. Browning might as briefly, and I think more fully, have
expressed the salient quality of his poet, even while he could describe it
in these emphatic words:

‘I pass at once, therefore, from Shelley’s minor excellencies to his
noblest and predominating characteristic.

‘This I call his simultaneous perception of Power and Love in the
absolute, and of Beauty and Good in the concrete, while he throws, from
his poet’s station between both, swifter, subtler, and more numerous films
for the connexion of each with each, than have been thrown by any modern
artificer of whom I have knowledge . . . I would rather consider Shelley’s
poetry as a sublime fragmentary essay towards a presentment of the
correspondency of the universe to Deity, of the natural to the spiritual,
and of the actual to the ideal than . . .’

This essay has, in common with the poems of the preceding years, the one
quality of a largely religious and, in a certain sense, Christian spirit,
and in this respect it falls naturally into the general series of its
author’s works. The assertion of Platonic ideas suggests, however, a mood
of spiritual thought for which the reference in ‘Pauline’ has been our
only, and a scarcely sufficient preparation; nor could the most definite
theism to be extracted from Platonic beliefs ever satisfy the human
aspirations which, in a nature like that of Robert Browning, culminate in
the idea of God. The metaphysical aspect of the poet’s genius here
distinctly reappears for the first time since ‘Sordello’, and also for the
last. It becomes merged in the simpler forms of the religious imagination.

The justification of the man Shelley, to which great part of the Essay is
devoted, contains little that would seem new to his more recent
apologists; little also which to the writer’s later judgments continued to
recommend itself as true. It was as a great poetic artist, not as a great
poet, that the author of ‘Prometheus’ and ‘The Cenci’, of ‘Julian and
Maddalo’, and ‘Epipsychidion’ was finally to rank in Mr. Browning’s mind.
The whole remains nevertheless a memorial of a very touching affection;
and whatever intrinsic value the Essay may possess, its main interest must
always be biographical. Its motive and inspiration are set forth in the
closing lines:

‘It is because I have long held these opinions in assurance and gratitude,
that I catch at the opportunity offered to me of expressing them here;
knowing that the alacrity to fulfil an humble office conveys more love
than the acceptance of the honour of a higher one, and that better,
therefore, than the signal service it was the dream of my boyhood to
render to his fame and memory, may be the saying of a few, inadequate
words upon these scarcely more important supplementary letters of Shelley.’

If Mr. Browning had seen reason to doubt the genuineness of the letters in
question, his Introduction could not have been written. That, while
receiving them as genuine, he thought them unimportant, gave it, as he
justly discerned, its full significance.

Mr. and Mrs. Browning returned to London for the summer of 1852, and we
have a glimpse of them there in a letter from Mr. Fox to his daughter.

July 16, ’52.

‘. . . I had a charming hour with the Brownings yesterday; more fascinated
with her than ever. She talked lots of George Sand, and so beautifully.
Moreover she silver-electroplated Louis Napoleon!! They are lodging at 58
Welbeck Street; the house has a queer name on the door, and belongs to
some Belgian family.

‘They came in late one night, and R. B. says that in the morning twilight
he saw three portraits on the bedroom wall, and speculated who they might
be. Light gradually showed the first, Beatrice Cenci, “Good!” said he; “in
a poetic region.” More light: the second, Lord Byron! Who can the third
be? And what think you it was, but your sketch (engraved chalk portrait)
of me? He made quite a poem and picture of the affair.

‘She seems much better; did not put her hand before her mouth, which I
took as a compliment: and the young Florentine was gracious . . .’

It need hardly be said that this valued friend was one of the first whom
Mr. Browning introduced to his wife, and that she responded with ready
warmth to his claims on her gratitude and regard. More than one joint
letter from herself and her husband commemorates this new phase of the
intimacy; one especially interesting was written from Florence in 1858, in
answer to the announcement by Mr. Fox of his election for Oldham; and Mr.
Browning’s contribution, which is very characteristic, will appear in due
course.

Either this or the preceding summer brought Mr. Browning for the first
time into personal contact with an early lover of his works: Mr. D. G.
Rossetti. They had exchanged letters a year or two before, on the subject
of ‘Pauline’, which Rossetti (as I have already mentioned) had read in
ignorance of its origin, but with the conviction that only the author of
‘Paracelsus’ could have produced it. He wrote to Mr. Browning to ascertain
the fact, and to tell him he had admired the poem so much as to transcribe
it whole from the British Museum copy. He now called on him with Mr.
William Allingham; and doubly recommended himself to the poet’s interest
by telling him that he was a painter. When Mr. Browning was again in
London, in 1855, Rossetti began painting his portrait, which he finished
in Paris in the ensuing winter.

The winter of 1852-3 saw the family once more in Florence, and at Casa
Guidi, where the routine of quiet days was resumed. Mrs. Browning has
spoken in more than one of her letters of the comparative social seclusion
in which she and her husband had elected to live. This seclusion was much
modified in later years, and many well-known English and American names
become associated with their daily life. It referred indeed almost
entirely to their residence in Florence, where they found less inducement
to enter into society than in London, Paris, and Rome. But it is on record
that during the fifteen years of his married life, Mr. Browning never
dined away from home, except on one occasion—an exception proving
the rule; and we cannot therefore be surprised that he should subsequently
have carried into the experience of an unshackled and very interesting
social intercourse, a kind of freshness which a man of fifty has not
generally preserved.

The one excitement which presented itself in the early months of 1853 was
the production of ‘Colombe’s Birthday’. The first allusion to this comes
to us in a letter from the poet to Lady, then Mrs. Theodore, Martin, from
which I quote a few passages.

Florence: Jan. 31, ’53.

‘My dear Mrs. Martin,—. . . be assured that I, for my part, have
been in no danger of forgetting my promises any more than your
performances—which were admirable of all kinds. I shall be delighted
if you can do anything for “Colombe”—do what you think best with it,
and for me—it will be pleasant to be in such hands—only, pray
follow the corrections in the last edition—(Chapman and Hall will
give you a copy)—as they are important to the sense. As for the
condensation into three acts—I shall leave that, and all cuttings
and the like, to your own judgment—and, come what will, I shall have
to be grateful to you, as before. For the rest, you will play the part to
heart’s content, I know. . . . And how good it will be to see you
again, and make my wife see you too—she who “never saw a great
actress” she says—unless it was Dejazet! . . .’

Mrs. Browning writes about the performance, April 12:

‘. . . I am beginning to be anxious about ‘Colombe’s Birthday’. I care
much more about it than Robert does. He says that no one will mistake it
for his speculation; it’s Mr. Buckstone’s affair altogether. True—but
I should like it to succeed, being Robert’s play, notwithstanding. But the
play is subtle and refined for pits and galleries. I am nervous about it.
On the other hand, those theatrical people ought to know,—and what
in the world made them select it, if it is not likely to answer their
purpose? By the way, a dreadful rumour reaches us of its having been
“prepared for the stage by the author.” Don’t believe a word of it. Robert
just said “yes” when they wrote to ask him, and not a line of
communication has passed since. He has prepared nothing at all, suggested
nothing, modified nothing. He referred them to his new edition, and that
was the whole. . . .’

She communicates the result in May:

‘. . . Yes, Robert’s play succeeded, but there could be no “run” for a
play of that kind. It was a “succes d’estime” and something more, which is
surprising perhaps, considering the miserable acting of the men. Miss
Faucit was alone in doing us justice. . . .’

Mrs. Browning did see ‘Miss Faucit’ on her next visit to England. She
agreeably surprised that lady by presenting herself alone, one morning, at
her house, and remaining with her for an hour and a half. The only person
who had ‘done justice’ to ‘Colombe’ besides contributing to whatever
success her husband’s earlier plays had obtained, was much more than ‘a
great actress’ to Mrs. Browning’s mind; and we may imagine it would have
gone hard with her before she renounced the pleasure of making her
acquaintance.

Two letters, dated from the Baths of Lucca, July 15 and August 20, ’53,
tell how and where the ensuing summer was passed, besides introducing us,
for the first time, to Mr. and Mrs. William Story, between whose family
and that of Mr. Browning so friendly an intimacy was ever afterwards to
subsist.

July 15.

‘. . . We have taken a villa at the Baths of Lucca after a little holy
fear of the company there—but the scenery, and the coolness, and
convenience altogether prevail, and we have taken our villa for three
months or rather more, and go to it next week with a stiff resolve of not
calling nor being called upon. You remember perhaps that we were there
four years ago just after the birth of our child. The mountains are
wonderful in beauty, and we mean to buy our holiday by doing some work.

‘Oh yes! I confess to loving Florence, and to having associated with it
the idea of home. . . .’

Casa Tolomei, Alta Villa, Bagni di Lucca: Aug. 20.

‘. . . We are enjoying the mountains here—riding the donkeys in the
footsteps of the sheep, and eating strawberries and milk by basinsful. The
strawberries succeed one another throughout the summer, through growing on
different aspects of the hills. If a tree is felled in the forests,
strawberries spring up, just as mushrooms might, and the peasants sell
them for just nothing. . . . Then our friends Mr. and Mrs. Story help the
mountains to please us a good deal. He is the son of Judge Story, the
biographer of his father, and for himself, sculptor and poet—and she
a sympathetic graceful woman, fresh and innocent in face and thought. We
go backwards and forwards to tea and talk at one another’s houses.

‘. . . Since I began this letter we have had a grand donkey excursion to a
village called Benabbia, and the cross above it on the mountain-peak. We
returned in the dark, and were in some danger of tumbling down various
precipices—but the scenery was exquisite—past speaking of for
beauty. Oh, those jagged mountains, rolled together like pre-Adamite
beasts and setting their teeth against the sky—it was wonderful. . .
.’

Mr. Browning’s share of the work referred to was ‘In a Balcony’; also,
probably, some of the ‘Men and Women’; the scene of the declaration in ‘By
the Fireside’ was laid in a little adjacent mountain-gorge to which he
walked or rode. A fortnight’s visit from Mr., now Lord, Lytton, was also
an incident of this summer.

The next three letters from which I am able to quote, describe the
impressions of Mrs. Browning’s first winter in Rome.

Rome: 43 Via Bocca di Leone, 30 piano. Jan. 18, 54.

‘. . . Well, we are all well to begin with—and have been well—our
troubles came to us through sympathy entirely. A most exquisite journey of
eight days we had from Florence to Rome, seeing the great monastery and
triple church of Assisi and the wonderful Terni by the way—that
passion of the waters which makes the human heart seem so still. In the
highest spirits we entered Rome, Robert and Penini singing actually—for
the child was radiant and flushed with the continual change of air and
scene. . . . You remember my telling you of our friends the Storys—how
they and their two children helped to make the summer go pleasantly at the
Baths of Lucca. They had taken an apartment for us in Rome, so that we
arrived in comfort to lighted fires and lamps as if coming home,—and
we had a glimpse of their smiling faces that evening. In the morning
before breakfast, little Edith was brought over to us by the manservant
with a message, “the boy was in convulsions—there was danger.” We
hurried to the house, of course, leaving Edith with Wilson. Too true! All
that first day we spent beside a death-bed; for the child never rallied—never
opened his eyes in consciousness—and by eight in the evening he was
gone. In the meanwhile, Edith was taken ill at our house—could not
be moved, said the physicians . . . gastric fever, with a tendency to the
brain—and within two days her life was almost despaired of—exactly
the same malady as her brother’s. . . . Also the English nurse was
apparently dying at the Story’s house, and Emma Page, the artist’s
youngest daughter, sickened with the same disease.

‘. . . To pass over the dreary time, I will tell you at once that the
three patients recovered—only in poor little Edith’s case Roman
fever followed the gastric, and has persisted ever since in periodical
recurrence. She is very pale and thin. Roman fever is not dangerous to
life, but it is exhausting. . . . Now you will understand what ghostly
flakes of death have changed the sense of Rome to me. The first day by a
death-bed, the first drive-out, to the cemetery, where poor little Joe is
laid close to Shelley’s heart (“Cor cordium” says the epitaph) and where
the mother insisted on going when she and I went out in the carriage
together—I am horribly weak about such things—I can’t look on
the earth-side of death—I flinch from corpses and graves, and never
meet a common funeral without a sort of horror. When I look deathwards I
look over death, and upwards, or I can’t look that way at all. So
that it was a struggle with me to sit upright in that carriage in which
the poor stricken mother sat so calmly—not to drop from the seat.
Well—all this has blackened Rome to me. I can’t think about the
Caesars in the old strain of thought—the antique words get muddled
and blurred with warm dashes of modern, everyday tears and fresh
grave-clay. Rome is spoilt to me—there’s the truth. Still, one lives
through one’s associations when not too strong, and I have arrived at
almost enjoying some things—the climate, for instance, which, though
pernicious to the general health, agrees particularly with me, and the
sight of the blue sky floating like a sea-tide through the great gaps and
rifts of ruins. . . . We are very comfortably settled in rooms turned to
the sun, and do work and play by turns, having almost too many visitors,
hear excellent music at Mrs. Sartoris’s (A. K.) once or twice a week, and
have Fanny Kemble to come and talk to us with the doors shut, we three
together. This is pleasant. I like her decidedly.

‘If anybody wants small talk by handfuls, of glittering dust swept out of
salons, here’s Mr. Thackeray besides! . . .’

Rome: March 29.

‘. . . We see a good deal of the Kembles here, and like them both,
especially Fanny, who is looking magnificent still, with her black hair
and radiant smile. A very noble creature indeed. Somewhat unelastic,
unpliant to the age, attached to the old modes of thought and convention—but
noble in qualities and defects. I like her much. She thinks me credulous
and full of dreams—but does not despise me for that reason—which
is good and tolerant of her, and pleasant too, for I should not be quite
easy under her contempt. Mrs. Sartoris is genial and generous—her
milk has had time to stand to cream in her happy family relations, which
poor Fanny Kemble’s has not had. Mrs. Sartoris’ house has the best society
in Rome—and exquisite music of course. We met Lockhart there, and my
husband sees a good deal of him—more than I do—because of the
access of cold weather lately which has kept me at home chiefly. Robert
went down to the seaside, on a day’s excursion with him and the Sartorises—and
I hear found favour in his sight. Said the critic, “I like Browning—he
isn’t at all like a damned literary man.” That’s a compliment, I believe,
according to your dictionary. It made me laugh and think of you directly.
. . . Robert has been sitting for his picture to Mr. Fisher, the English
artist who painted Mr. Kenyon and Landor. You remember those pictures in
Mr. Kenyon’s house in London. Well, he has painted Robert’s, and it is an
admirable likeness. The expression is an exceptional expression, but
highly characteristic. . . .’

May 19.

‘. . . To leave Rome will fill me with barbarian complacency. I don’t
pretend to have a ray of sentiment about Rome. It’s a palimpsest Rome, a
watering-place written over the antique, and I haven’t taken to it as a
poet should I suppose. And let us speak the truth above all things. I am
strongly a creature of association, and the associations of the place have
not been personally favourable to me. Among the rest, my child, the light
of my eyes, has been more unwell than I ever saw him. . . . The
pleasantest days in Rome we have spent with the Kembles, the two sisters,
who are charming and excellent both of them, in different ways, and
certainly they have given us some excellent hours in the Campagna, upon
picnic excursions—they, and certain of their friends; for instance,
M. Ampere, the member of the French Institute, who is witty and agreeable,
M. Goltz, the Austrian minister, who is an agreeable man, and Mr. Lyons,
the son of Sir Edmund, &c. The talk was almost too brilliant for the
sentiment of the scenery, but it harmonized entirely with the mayonnaise
and champagne. . . .’

It must have been on one of the excursions here described that an incident
took place, which Mr. Browning relates with characteristic comments in a
letter to Mrs. Fitz-Gerald, of July 15, 1882. The picnic party had
strolled away to some distant spot. Mrs. Browning was not strong enough to
join them, and her husband, as a matter of course, stayed with her; which
act of consideration prompted Mrs. Kemble to exclaim that he was the only
man she had ever known who behaved like a Christian to his wife. She was,
when he wrote this letter, reading his works for the first time, and had
expressed admiration for them; but, he continued, none of the kind things
she said to him on that subject could move him as did those words in the
Campagna. Mrs. Kemble would have modified her statement in later years,
for the sake of one English and one American husband now closely related
to her. Even then, perhaps, she did not make it without inward reserve.
But she will forgive me, I am sure, for having repeated it.

Mr. Browning also refers to her Memoirs, which he had just read, and says:
‘I saw her in those [I conclude earlier] days much oftener than is set
down, but she scarcely noticed me; though I always liked her extremely.’

Another of Mrs. Browning’s letters is written from Florence, June 6 (’54):

‘. . . We mean to stay at Florence a week or two longer and then go
northward. I love Florence—the place looks exquisitely beautiful in
its garden ground of vineyards and olive trees, sung round by the
nightingales day and night. . . . If you take one thing with another,
there is no place in the world like Florence, I am persuaded, for a place
to live in—cheap, tranquil, cheerful, beautiful, within the limits
of civilization yet out of the crush of it. . . . We have spent two
delicious evenings at villas outside the gates, one with young Lytton, Sir
Edward’s son, of whom I have told you, I think. I like him . . . we both
do . . . from the bottom of our hearts. Then, our friend, Frederick
Tennyson, the new poet, we are delighted to see again.

. . . . .

‘. . . Mrs. Sartoris has been here on her way to Rome, spending most of
her time with us . . . singing passionately and talking eloquently. She is
really charming. . . .’

I have no record of that northward journey or of the experiences of the
winter of 1854-5. In all probability Mr. and Mrs. Browning remained in, or
as near as possible to, Florence, since their income was still too limited
for continuous travelling. They possibly talked of going to England, but
postponed it till the following year; we know that they went there in
1855, taking his sister with them as they passed through Paris. They did
not this time take lodgings for the summer months, but hired a house at 13
Dorset Street, Portman Square; and there, on September 27, Tennyson read
his new poem, ‘Maud’, to Mrs. Browning, while Rossetti, the only other
person present besides the family, privately drew his likeness in pen and
ink. The likeness has become well known; the unconscious sitter must also,
by this time, be acquainted with it; but Miss Browning thinks no one
except herself, who was near Rossetti at the table, was at the moment
aware of its being made. All eyes must have been turned towards Tennyson,
seated by his hostess on the sofa. Miss Arabel Barrett was also of the
party.

Some interesting words of Mrs. Browning’s carry their date in the allusion
to Mr. Ruskin; but I cannot ascertain it more precisely:

‘We went to Denmark Hill yesterday to have luncheon with them, and see the
Turners, which, by the way, are divine. I like Mr. Ruskin much, and so
does Robert. Very gentle, yet earnest,—refined and truthful. I like
him very much. We count him one among the valuable acquaintances made this
year in England.’

Chapter 12

1855-1858

‘Men and Women’—’Karshook’—’Two in the Campagna’—Winter
in Paris; Lady Elgin—’Aurora Leigh’—Death of Mr. Kenyon and
Mr. Barrett—Penini—Mrs. Browning’s Letters to Miss Browning—The
Florentine Carnival—Baths of Lucca—Spiritualism—Mr.
Kirkup; Count Ginnasi—Letter from Mr. Browning to Mr. Fox—Havre.

The beautiful ‘One Word More’ was dated from London in September; and the
fifty poems gathered together under the title of ‘Men and Women’ were
published before the close of the year, in two volumes, by Messrs. Chapman
and Hall.* They are all familiar friends to Mr. Browning’s readers, in
their first arrangement and appearance, as in later redistributions and
reprints; but one curious little fact concerning them is perhaps not
generally known. In the eighth line of the fourteenth section of ‘One Word
More’ they were made to include ‘Karshook (Ben Karshook’s Wisdom)’, which
never was placed amongst them. It was written in April 1854; and the
dedication of the volume must have been, as it so easily might be, in
existence, before the author decided to omit it. The wrong name, once
given, was retained, I have no doubt, from preference for its terminal
sound; and ‘Karshook’ only became ‘Karshish’ in the Tauchnitz copy of
1872, and in the English edition of 1889.

‘Karshook’ appeared in 1856 in ‘The Keepsake’, edited by Miss Power; but,
as we are told on good authority, has been printed in no edition or
selection of the Poet’s works. I am therefore justified in inserting it
here.

Among this first collection of ‘Men and Women’ was the poem called ‘Two in
the Campagna’. It is a vivid, yet enigmatical little study of a restless
spirit tantalized by glimpses of repose in love, saddened and perplexed by
the manner in which this eludes it. Nothing that should impress one as
more purely dramatic ever fell from Mr. Browning’s pen. We are told,
nevertheless, in Mr. Sharp’s ‘Life’, that a personal character no less
actual than that of the ‘Guardian Angel’ has been claimed for it. The
writer, with characteristic delicacy, evades all discussion of the
question; but he concedes a great deal in his manner of doing so. The
poem, he says, conveys a sense of that necessary isolation of the
individual soul which resists the fusing power of the deepest love; and
its meaning cannot be personally—because it is universally—true.
I do not think Mr. Browning meant to emphasize this aspect of the mystery
of individual life, though the poem, in a certain sense, expresses it. We
have no reason to believe that he ever accepted it as constant; and in no
case could he have intended to refer its conditions to himself. He was
often isolated by the processes of his mind; but there was in him no
barrier to that larger emotional sympathy which we think of as sympathy of
the soul. If this poem were true, ‘One Word More’ would be false, quite
otherwise than in that approach to exaggeration which is incidental to the
poetic form. The true keynote of ‘Two in the Campagna’ is the pain of
perpetual change, and of the conscious, though unexplained, predestination
to it. Mr. Browning could have still less in common with such a state,
since one of the qualities for which he was most conspicuous was the
enormous power of anchorage which his affections possessed. Only length of
time and variety of experience could fully test this power or fully
display it; but the signs of it had not been absent from even his earliest
life. He loved fewer people in youth than in advancing age: nature and
circumstance combined to widen the range, and vary the character of his
human interests; but where once love or friendship had struck a root, only
a moral convulsion could avail to dislodge it. I make no deduction from
this statement when I admit that the last and most emphatic words of the
poem in question,

did probably come from the poet’s heart, as they also found a deep echo in
that of his wife, who much loved them.

From London they returned to Paris for the winter of 1855-6. The younger
of the Kemble sisters, Mrs. Sartoris, was also there with her family; and
the pleasant meetings of the Campagna renewed themselves for Mr. Browning,
though in a different form. He was also, with his sister, a constant
visitor at Lady Elgin’s. Both they and Mrs. Browning were greatly attached
to her, and she warmly reciprocated the feeling. As Mr. Locker’s letter
has told us, Mr. Browning was in the habit of reading poetry to her, and
when his sister had to announce his arrival from Italy or England, she
would say: ‘Robert is coming to nurse you, and read to you.’ Lady Elgin
was by this time almost completely paralyzed. She had lost the power of
speech, and could only acknowledge the little attentions which were paid
to her by some graceful pathetic gesture of the left hand; but she
retained her sensibilities to the last; and Miss Browning received on one
occasion a serious lesson in the risk of ever assuming that the appearance
of unconsciousness guarantees its reality. Lady Augusta Bruce had asked
her, in her mother’s presence, how Mrs. Browning was; and, imagining that
Lady Elgin was unable to hear or understand, she had answered with
incautious distinctness, ‘I am afraid she is very ill,’ when a little sob
from the invalid warned her of her mistake. Lady Augusta quickly repaired
it by rejoining, ‘but she is better than she was, is she not?’ Miss
Browning of course assented.

There were other friends, old and new, whom Mr. Browning occasionally saw,
including, I need hardly say, the celebrated Madame Mohl. In the main,
however, he led a quiet life, putting aside many inducements to leave his
home.

Mrs. Browning was then writing ‘Aurora Leigh’, and her husband must have
been more than ever impressed by her power of work, as displayed by her
manner of working. To him, as to most creative writers, perfect quiet was
indispensable to literary production. She wrote in pencil, on scraps of
paper, as she lay on the sofa in her sitting-room, open to interruption
from chance visitors, or from her little omnipresent son; simply hiding
the paper beside her if anyone came in, and taking it up again when she
was free. And if this process was conceivable in the large, comparatively
silent spaces of their Italian home, and amidst habits of life which
reserved social intercourse for the close of the working day, it baffles
belief when one thinks of it as carried on in the conditions of a Parisian
winter, and the little ‘salon’ of the apartment in the Rue du Colisee in
which those months were spent. The poem was completed in the ensuing
summer, in Mr. Kenyon’s London house, and dedicated, October 17, in deeply
pathetic words to that faithful friend, whom the writer was never to see
again.

The news of his death, which took place in December 1856, reached Mr. and
Mrs. Browning in Florence, to be followed in the spring by that of Mrs.
Browning’s father. Husband and wife had both determined to forego any
pecuniary benefit which might accrue to them from this event; but they
were not called upon to exercise their powers of renunciation. By Mr.
Kenyon’s will they were the richer, as is now, I think, generally known,
the one by six thousand, the other by four thousand guineas.* Of that
cousin’s long kindness Mrs. Browning could scarcely in after-days trust
herself to speak. It was difficult to her, she said, even to write his
name without tears.

I have alluded, perhaps tardily, to Mr. Browning’s son, a sociable little
being who must for some time have been playing a prominent part in his
parents’ lives. I saw him for the first time in this winter of 1855-6, and
remember the grave expression of the little round face, the outline of
which was common, at all events in childhood, to all the members of his
mother’s family, and was conspicuous in her, if we may trust an early
portrait which has recently come to light. He wore the curling hair to
which she refers in a later letter, and pretty frocks and frills, in which
she delighted to clothe him. It is on record that, on one of the journeys
of this year, a trunk was temporarily lost which contained Peni’s
embroidered trousers, and the MS., whole or in part, of ‘Aurora Leigh’;
and that Mrs. Browning had scarcely a thought to spare for her poem, in
face of the damage to her little boy’s appearance which the accident
involved.

How he came by his familiar name of Penini—hence Peni, and Pen—neither
signifies in itself, nor has much bearing on his father’s family history;
but I cannot refrain from a word of comment on Mr. Hawthorne’s fantastic
conjecture, which has been asserted and reasserted in opposition to Mr.
Browning’s own statement of the case. According to Mr. Hawthorne, the name
was derived from Apennino, and bestowed on the child in babyhood, because
Apennino was a colossal statue, and he was so very small. It would be
strange indeed that any joke connecting ‘Baby’ with a given colossal
statue should have found its way into the family without father, mother,
or nurse being aware of it; or that any joke should have been accepted
there which implied that the little boy was not of normal size. But the
fact is still more unanswerable that Apennino could by no process
congenial to the Italian language be converted into Penini. Its inevitable
abbreviation would be Pennino with a distinct separate sounding of the
central n’s, or Nino. The accentuation of Penini is also distinctly
German.

During this winter in Paris, little Wiedemann, as his parents tried to
call him—his full name was Robert Wiedemann Barrett—had
developed a decided turn for blank verse. He would extemporize short
poems, singing them to his mother, who wrote them down as he sang. There
is no less proof of his having possessed a talent for music, though it
first naturally showed itself in the love of a cheerful noise. His father
had once sat down to the piano, for a serious study of some piece, when
the little boy appeared, with the evident intention of joining in the
performance. Mr. Browning rose precipitately, and was about to leave the
room. ‘Oh!’ exclaimed the hurt mother, ‘you are going away, and he has
brought his three drums to accompany you upon.’ She herself would
undoubtedly have endured the mixed melody for a little time, though her
husband did not think she seriously wished him to do so. But if he did not
play the piano to the accompaniment of Pen’s drums, he played piano duets
with him as soon as the boy was old enough to take part in them; and
devoted himself to his instruction in this, as in other and more important
branches of knowledge.

Peni had also his dumb companions, as his father had had before him.
Tortoises lived at one end of the famous balcony at Casa Guidi; and when
the family were at the Baths of Lucca, Mr. Browning would stow away little
snakes in his bosom, and produce them for the child’s amusement. As the
child grew into a man, the love of animals which he had inherited became
conspicuous in him; and it gave rise to many amusing and some pathetic
little episodes of his artist life. The creatures which he gathered about
him were generally, I think, more highly organized than those which
elicited his father’s peculiar tenderness; it was natural that he should
exact more pictorial or more companionable qualities from them. But father
and son concurred in the fondness for snakes, and in a singular
predilection for owls; and they had not been long established in Warwick
Crescent, when a bird of that family was domesticated there. We shall hear
of it in a letter from Mr. Browning.

Of his son’s moral quality as quite a little child his father has told me
pretty and very distinctive stories, but they would be out of place here.*

Mrs. Browning seems now to have adopted the plan of writing independent
letters to her sister-in-law; and those available for our purpose are
especially interesting. The buoyancy of tone which has habitually marked
her communications, but which failed during the winter in Rome, reasserts
itself in the following extract. Her maternal comments on Peni and his
perfections have hitherto been so carefully excluded, that a brief
allusion to him may be allowed on the present occasion.

1857.

‘My dearest Sarianna, . . . Here is Penini’s letter, which takes up so
much room that I must be sparing of mine—and, by the way, if you
consider him improved in his writing, give the praise to Robert, who has
been taking most patient pains with him indeed. You will see how the
little curly head is turned with carnival doings. So gay a carnival never
was in our experience, for until last year (when we were absent) all masks
had been prohibited, and now everybody has eaten of the tree of good and
evil till not an apple is left. Peni persecuted me to let him have a
domino—with tears and embraces—he “almost never in all
his life had had a domino,” and he would like it so. Not a black domino!
no—he hated black—but a blue domino, trimmed with pink! that
was his taste. The pink trimming I coaxed him out of, but for the rest, I
let him have his way. . . . For my part, the universal madness reached me
sitting by the fire (whence I had not stirred for three months), and you
will open your eyes when I tell you that I went (in domino and masked) to
the great opera-ball. Yes! I did, really. Robert, who had been invited two
or three times to other people’s boxes, had proposed to return their
kindness by taking a box himself at the opera this night, and entertaining
two or three friends with galantine and champagne. Just as he and I were
lamenting the impossibility of my going, on that very morning the wind
changed, the air grew soft and mild, and he maintained that I might and
should go. There was no time to get a domino of my own (Robert himself had
a beautiful one made, and I am having it metamorphosed into a black silk
gown for myself!) so I sent out and hired one, buying the mask. And very
much amused I was. I like to see these characteristic things. (I shall
never rest, Sarianna, till I risk my reputation at the ‘bal de l’opera’ at
Paris). Do you think I was satisfied with staying in the box? No, indeed.
Down I went, and Robert and I elbowed our way through the crowd to the
remotest corner of the ball below. Somebody smote me on the shoulder and
cried “Bella Mascherina!” and I answered as impudently as one feels under
a mask. At two o’clock in the morning, however, I had to give up and come
away (being overcome by the heavy air) and ingloriously left Robert and
our friends to follow at half-past four. Think of the refinement and
gentleness—yes, I must call it superiority of this people—when
no excess, no quarrelling, no rudeness nor coarseness can be observed in
the course of such wild masked liberty; not a touch of licence anywhere,
and perfect social equality! Our servant Ferdinando side by side in the
same ball-room with the Grand Duke, and no class’s delicacy offended
against! For the Grand Duke went down into the ball-room for a short time.
. . .’

The summer of 1857 saw the family once more at the Baths of Lucca, and
again in company with Mr. Lytton. He had fallen ill at the house of their
common friend, Miss Blagden, also a visitor there; and Mr. Browning shared
in the nursing, of which she refused to entrust any part to less friendly
hands. He sat up with the invalid for four nights; and would doubtless
have done so for as many more as seemed necessary, but that Mrs. Browning
protested against this trifling with his own health.

The only serious difference which ever arose between Mr. Browning and his
wife referred to the subject of spiritualism. Mrs. Browning held doctrines
which prepared her to accept any real or imagined phenomena betokening
intercourse with the spirits of the dead; nor could she be repelled by
anything grotesque or trivial in the manner of this intercourse, because
it was no part of her belief that a spirit still inhabiting the atmosphere
of our earth, should exhibit any dignity or solemnity not belonging to him
while he lived upon it. The question must have been discussed by them on
its general grounds at a very early stage of their intimacy; but it only
assumed practical importance when Mr. Home came to Florence in 1857 or
1858. Mr. Browning found himself compelled to witness some of the
‘manifestations’. He was keenly alive to their generally prosaic and
irreverent character, and to the appearance of jugglery which was then
involved in them. He absolutely denied the good faith of all the persons
concerned. Mrs. Browning as absolutely believed it; and no compromise
between them was attainable, because, strangely enough, neither of them
admitted as possible that mediums or witnesses should deceive themselves.
The personal aspect which the question thus received brought it into
closer and more painful contact with their daily life. They might agree to
differ as to the abstract merits of spiritualism; but Mr. Browning could
not resign himself to his wife’s trustful attitude towards some of the
individuals who at that moment represented it. He may have had no
substantial fear of her doing anything that could place her in their
power, though a vague dread of this seems to have haunted him; but he
chafed against the public association of her name with theirs. Both his
love for and his pride in her resented it.

He had subsided into a more judicial frame of mind when he wrote ‘Sludge
the Medium’, in which he says everything which can excuse the liar and,
what is still more remarkable, modify the lie. So far back as the autumn
of 1860 I heard him discuss the trickery which he believed himself to have
witnessed, as dispassionately as any other non-credulous person might have
done so. The experience must even before that have passed out of the
foreground of his conjugal life. He remained, nevertheless, subject, for
many years, to gusts of uncontrollable emotion which would sweep over him
whenever the question of ‘spirits’ or ‘spiritualism’ was revived; and we
can only understand this in connection with the peculiar circumstances of
the case. With all his faith in the future, with all his constancy to the
past, the memory of pain was stronger in him than any other. A single
discordant note in the harmony of that married love, though merged in its
actual existence, would send intolerable vibrations through his
remembrance of it. And the pain had not been, in this instance, that of
simple disagreement. It was complicated by Mrs. Browning’s refusal to
admit that disagreement was possible. She never believed in her husband’s
disbelief; and he had been not unreasonably annoyed by her always assuming
it to be feigned. But his doubt of spiritualistic sincerity was not
feigned. She cannot have thought, and scarcely can have meant to say so.
She may have meant to say, ‘You believe that these are tricks, but you
know that there is something real behind them;’ and so far, if no farther,
she may have been in the right. Mr. Browning never denied the abstract
possibility of spiritual communication with either living or dead; he only
denied that such communication had ever been proved, or that any useful
end could be subserved by it. The tremendous potentialities of hypnotism
and thought-reading, now passing into the region of science, were not then
so remote but that an imagination like his must have foreshadowed them.
The natural basis of the seemingly supernatural had not yet entered into
discussion. He may, from the first, have suspected the existence of some
mysterious force, dangerous because not understood, and for this reason
doubly liable to fall into dangerous hands. And if this was so, he would
necessarily regard the whole system of manifestations with an apprehensive
hostility, which was not entire negation, but which rebelled against any
effort on the part of others, above all of those he loved, to interpret it
into assent. The pain and anger which could be aroused in him by an
indication on the part of a valued friend of even an impartial interest in
the subject points especially to the latter conclusion.

He often gave an instance of the tricks played in the name of spiritualism
on credulous persons, which may amuse those who have not yet heard it. I
give the story as it survives in the fresher memory of Mr. Val Prinsep,
who also received it from Mr. Browning.

‘At Florence lived a curious old savant who in his day was well known to
all who cared for art or history. I fear now few live who recollect
Kirkup. He was quite a mine of information on all kinds of forgotten lore.
It was he who discovered Giotto’s portrait of Dante in the Bargello.
Speaking of some friend, he said, “He is a most ignorant fellow! Why, he
does not know how to cast a horoscope!” Of him Browning told me the
following story. Kirkup was much taken up with spiritualism, in which he
firmly believed. One day Browning called on him to borrow a book. He rang
loudly at the storey, for he knew Kirkup, like Landor, was quite deaf. To
his astonishment the door opened at once and Kirkup appeared.

‘”Come in,” he cried; “the spirits told me there was some one at the door.
Ah! I know you do not believe! Come and see. Mariana is in a trance!”

‘Browning entered. In the middle room, full of all kinds of curious
objects of “vertu”, stood a handsome peasant girl, with her eyes fixed as
though she were in a trance.

‘”You see, Browning,” said Kirkup, “she is quite insensible, and has no
will of her own. Mariana, hold up your arm.”

‘The woman slowly did as she was bid.

‘”She cannot take it down till I tell her,” cried Kirkup.

‘”Very curious,” observed Browning. “Meanwhile I have come to ask you to
lend me a book.”

‘Kirkup, as soon as he was made to hear what book was wanted, said he
should be delighted.

‘”Wait a bit. It is in the next room.”

‘The old man shuffled out at the door. No sooner had he disappeared than
the woman turned to Browning, winked, and putting down her arm leaned it
on his shoulder. When Kirkup returned she resumed her position and rigid
look.

‘”Here is the book,” said Kirkup. “Isn’t it wonderful?” he added, pointing
to the woman.

‘”Wonderful,” agreed Browning as he left the room.

‘The woman and her family made a good thing of poor Kirkup’s
spiritualism.’

Something much more remarkable in reference to this subject happened to
the poet himself during his residence in Florence. It is related in a
letter to the ‘Spectator’, dated January 30, 1869, and signed J. S. K.

‘Mr. Robert Browning tells me that when he was in Florence some years
since, an Italian nobleman (a Count Ginnasi of Ravenna), visiting at
Florence, was brought to his house without previous introduction, by an
intimate friend. The Count professed to have great mesmeric and
clairvoyant faculties, and declared, in reply to Mr. Browning’s avowed
scepticism, that he would undertake to convince him somehow or other of
his powers. He then asked Mr. Browning whether he had anything about him
then and there, which he could hand to him, and which was in any way a
relic or memento. This Mr. Browning thought was perhaps because he
habitually wore no sort of trinket or ornament, not even a watchguard, and
might therefore turn out to be a safe challenge. But it so happened that,
by a curious accident, he was then wearing under his coat-sleeves some
gold wrist-studs which he had quite recently taken into wear, in the
absence (by mistake of a sempstress) of his ordinary wrist-buttons. He had
never before worn them in Florence or elsewhere, and had found them in
some old drawer where they had lain forgotten for years. One of these
studs he took out and handed to the Count, who held it in his hand a
while, looking earnestly in Mr. Browning’s face, and then he said, as if
much impressed, “C’equalche cosa che mi grida nell’ orecchio ‘Uccisione!
uccisione!'” (“There is something here which cries out in my ear, ‘Murder!
murder!'”)

‘”And truly,” says Mr. Browning, “those very studs were taken from the
dead body of a great uncle of mine who was violently killed on his estate
in St. Kitt’s, nearly eighty years ago. . . . The occurrence of my great
uncle’s murder was known only to myself of all men in Florence, as
certainly was also my possession of the studs.”‘

A letter from the poet, of July 21, 1883, affirms that the account is
correct in every particular, adding, ‘My own explanation of the matter has
been that the shrewd Italian felt his way by the involuntary help of my
own eyes and face.’ The story has been reprinted in the Reports of the
Psychical Society.

A pleasant piece of news came to brighten the January of 1858. Mr. Fox was
returned for Oldham, and at once wrote to announce the fact. He was
answered in a joint letter from Mr. and Mrs. Browning, interesting
throughout, but of which only the second part is quite suited for present
insertion.

Mrs. Browning, who writes first and at most length, ends by saying she
must leave a space for Robert, that Mr. Fox may be compensated for reading
all she has had to say. The husband continues as follows:

. . . ‘A space for Robert’ who has taken a breathing space—hardly
more than enough—to recover from his delight; he won’t say surprise,
at your letter, dear Mr. Fox. But it is all right and, like you, I wish
from my heart we could get close together again, as in those old days, and
what times we would have here in Italy! The realization of the children’s
prayer of angels at the corner of your bed (i.e. sofa), one to read and
one (my wife) to write,* and both to guard you through the night of
lodging-keeper’s extortions, abominable charges for firing, and so on.
(Observe, to call oneself ‘an angel’ in this land is rather humble, where
they are apt to be painted as plumed cutthroats or celestial police—you
say of Gabriel at his best and blithesomest, ‘Shouldn’t admire meeting him
in a narrow lane!’)

I say this foolishly just because I can’t trust myself to be earnest about
it. I would, you know, I would, always would, choose you out of the whole
English world to judge and correct what I write myself; my wife shall read
this and let it stand if I have told her so these twelve years—and
certainly I have not grown intellectually an inch over the good and kind
hand you extended over my head how many years ago! Now it goes over my
wife’s too.

How was it Tottie never came here as she promised? Is it to be some other
time? Do think of Florence, if ever you feel chilly, and hear quantities
about the Princess Royal’s marriage, and want a change. I hate the thought
of leaving Italy for one day more than I can help—and satisfy my
English predilections by newspapers and a book or two. One gets nothing of
that kind here, but the stuff out of which books grow,—it lies about
one’s feet indeed. Yet for me, there would be one book better than any now
to be got here or elsewhere, and all out of a great English head and
heart,—those ‘Memoirs’ you engaged to give us. Will you give us
them?

Goodbye now—if ever the whim strikes you to ‘make beggars happy’
remember us.

Love to Tottie, and love and gratitude to you, dear Mr. Fox, From yours
ever affectionately, Robert Browning.

In the summer of this year, the poet with his wife and child joined his
father and sister at Havre. It was the last time they were all to be
together.

Chapter 13

1858-1861

Mrs. Browning’s Illness—Siena—Letter from Mr. Browning to Mr.
Leighton —Mrs. Browning’s Letters continued—Walter Savage
Landor—Winter in Rome—Mr. Val Prinsep—Friends in Rome:
Mr. and Mrs. Cartwright—Multiplying Social Relations—Massimo
d’Azeglio—Siena again—Illness and Death of Mrs. Browning’s
Sister—Mr. Browning’s Occupations—Madame du Quaire—Mrs.
Browning’s last Illness and Death.

I cannot quite ascertain, though it might seem easy to do so, whether Mr.
and Mrs. Browning remained in Florence again till the summer of 1859, or
whether the intervening months were divided between Florence and Rome; but
some words in their letters favour the latter supposition. We hear of them
in September from Mr. Val Prinsep, in Siena or its neighbourhood; with Mr.
and Mrs. Story in an adjacent villa, and Walter Savage Landor in a
‘cottage’ close by. How Mr. Landor found himself of the party belongs to a
little chapter in Mr. Browning’s history for which I quote Mr. Colvin’s
words.* He was then living at Fiesole with his family, very unhappily, as
we all know; and Mr. Colvin relates how he had thrice left his villa
there, determined to live in Florence alone; and each time been brought
back to the nominal home where so little kindness awaited him.

‘. . . The fourth time he presented himself in the house of Mr. Browning
with only a few pauls in his pocket, declaring that nothing should ever
induce him to return.

‘Mr. Browning, an interview with the family at the villa having satisfied
him that reconciliation or return was indeed past question, put himself at
once in communication with Mr. Forster and with Landor’s brothers in
England. The latter instantly undertook to supply the needs of their
eldest brother during the remainder of his life. Thenceforth an income
sufficient for his frugal wants was forwarded regularly for his use
through the friend who had thus come forward at his need. To Mr.
Browning’s respectful and judicious guidance Landor showed himself docile
from the first. Removed from the inflictions, real and imaginary, of his
life at Fiesole, he became another man, and at times still seemed to those
about him like the old Landor at his best. It was in July, 1859, that the
new arrangements for his life were made. The remainder of that summer he
spent at Siena, first as the guest of Mr. Story, the American sculptor and
poet, next in a cottage rented for him by Mr. Browning near his own. In
the autumn of the same year Landor removed to a set of apartments in the
Via Nunziatina in Florence, close to the Casa Guidi, in a house kept by a
former servant of Mrs. Browning’s, an Englishwoman married to an Italian.*
Here he continued to live during the five years that yet remained to him.’

Mr. Landor’s presence is also referred to, with the more important
circumstance of a recent illness of Mrs. Browning’s, in two characteristic
and interesting letters of this period, one written by Mr. Browning to
Frederic Leighton, the other by his wife to her sister-in-law. Mr.—
now Sir F.— Leighton had been studying art during the previous
winter in Italy.

Kingdom of Piedmont, Siena: Oct. 9, ’59.

‘My dear Leighton—I hope—and think—you know what delight
it gave me to hear from you two months ago. I was in great trouble at the
time about my wife who was seriously ill. As soon as she could bear
removal we brought her to a villa here. She slowly recovered and is at
last well —I believe—but weak still and requiring more
attention than usual. We shall be obliged to return to Rome for the winter—not
choosing to risk losing what we have regained with some difficulty. Now
you know why I did not write at once—and may imagine why, having
waited so long, I put off telling you for a week or two till I could say
certainly what we do with ourselves. If any amount of endeavour could
induce you to join us there—Cartwright, Russell, the Vatican and all—and
if such a step were not inconsistent with your true interests—you
should have it: but I know very well that you love Italy too much not to
have had weighty reasons for renouncing her at present—and I want
your own good and not my own contentment in the matter. Wherever you are,
be sure I shall follow your proceedings with deep and true interest. I
heard of your successes—and am now anxious to know how you get on
with the great picture, the ‘Ex voto’—if it does not prove full of
beauty and power, two of us will be shamed, that’s all! But I don’t
fear, mind! Do keep me informed of your progress, from time to time—a
few lines will serve—and then I shall slip some day into your
studio, and buffet the piano, without having grown a stranger. Another
thing—do take proper care of your health, and exercise yourself;
give those vile indigestions no chance against you; keep up your spirits,
and be as distinguished and happy as God meant you should. Can I do
anything for you at Rome—not to say, Florence? We go thither (i.e.
to Florence) to-morrow, stay there a month, probably, and then take the
Siena road again.’

The next paragraph refers to some orders for photographs, and is not
specially interesting.

Cartwright arrived here a fortnight ago—very pleasant it was to see
him: he left for Florence, stayed a day or two and returned to Mrs.
Cartwright (who remained at the Inn) and they all departed prosperously
yesterday for Rome. Odo Russell spent two days here on his way thither—we
liked him much. Prinsep and Jones—do you know them?—are in the
town. The Storys have passed the summer in the villa opposite,—and
no less a lion than dear old Landor is in a house a few steps off. I take
care of him—his amiable family having clawed him a little too
sharply: so strangely do things come about! I mean his Fiesole ‘family’—a
trifle of wife, sons and daughter—not his English relatives, who are
generous and good in every way.

Take any opportunity of telling dear Mrs. Sartoris (however unnecessarily)
that I and my wife remember her with the old feeling—I trust she is
well and happy to heart’s content. Pen is quite well and rejoicing just
now in a Sardinian pony on which he gallops like Puck on a dragon-fly’s
back. My wife’s kind regard and best wishes go with those of, Dear
Leighton, yours affectionately ever, R. Browning.

October 1859.

Mrs. to Miss Browning.

‘. . . After all, it is not a cruel punishment to have to go to Rome again
this winter, though it will be an undesirable expense, and we did wish to
keep quiet this winter,—the taste for constant wanderings having
passed away as much for me as for Robert. We begin to see that by no
possible means can one spend as much money to so small an end—and
then we don’t work so well, don’t live to as much use either for ourselves
or others. Isa Blagden bids us observe that we pretend to live at
Florence, and are not there much above two months in the year, what with
going away for the summer and going away for the winter. It’s too true.
It’s the drawback of Italy. To live in one place there is impossible for
us, almost just as to live out of Italy at all, is impossible for us. It
isn’t caprice on our part. Siena pleases us very much—the silence
and repose have been heavenly things to me, and the country is very pretty—though
no more than pretty—nothing marked or romantic—no mountains,
except so far off as to be like a cloud only on clear days—and no
water. Pretty dimpled ground, covered with low vineyards, purple hills,
not high, with the sunsets clothing them. . . . We shall not leave
Florence till November—Robert must see Mr. Landor (his adopted son,
Sarianna) settled in his new apartments with Wilson for a duenna. It’s an
excellent plan for him and not a bad one for Wilson. . . . Forgive me if
Robert has told you this already. Dear darling Robert amuses me by talking
of his “gentleness and sweetness”. A most courteous and refined gentleman
he is, of course, and very affectionate to Robert (as he ought to be), but
of self-restraint, he has not a grain, and of suspiciousness, many grains.
Wilson will run many risks, and I, for one, would rather not run them.
What do you say to dashing down a plate on the floor when you don’t like
what’s on it? And the contadini at whose house he is lodging now have been
already accused of opening desks. Still upon that occasion (though there
was talk of the probability of Mr. Landor’s “throat being cut in his
sleep”—) as on other occasions, Robert succeeded in soothing him—and
the poor old lion is very quiet on the whole, roaring softly, to beguile
the time, in Latin alcaics against his wife and Louis Napoleon. He laughs
carnivorously when I tell him that one of these days he will have to write
an ode in honour of the Emperor, to please me.’

Mrs. Browning writes, somewhat later, from Rome:

‘. . . We left Mr. Landor in great comfort. I went to see his apartment
before it was furnished. Rooms small, but with a look-out into a little
garden, quiet and cheerful, and he doesn’t mind a situation rather out of
the way. He pays four pounds ten (English) the month. Wilson has thirty
pounds a year for taking care of him—which sounds a good deal, but
it is a difficult position. He has excellent, generous, affectionate
impulses—but the impulses of the tiger, every now and then. Nothing
coheres in him—either in his opinions, or, I fear, his affections.
It isn’t age—he is precisely the man of his youth, I must believe.
Still, his genius gives him the right of gratitude on all artists at
least, and I must say that my Robert has generously paid the debt. Robert
always said that he owed more as a writer to Landor than to any
contemporary. At present Landor is very fond of him—but I am quite
prepared for his turning against us as he has turned against Forster, who
has been so devoted for years and years. Only one isn’t kind for what one
gets by it, or there wouldn’t be much kindness in this world. . . .’

Mr. Browning always declared that his wife could impute evil to no one,
that she was a living denial of that doctrine of original sin to which her
Christianity pledged her; and the great breadth and perfect charity of her
views habitually justified the assertion; but she evidently possessed a
keen insight into character, which made her complete suspension of
judgment on the subject of Spiritualism very difficult to understand.

The spiritualistic coterie had found a satisfactory way of explaining Mr.
Browning’s antagonistic attitude towards it. He was jealous, it was said,
because the Spirits on one occasion had dropped a crown on to his wife’s
head and none on to his own. The first instalment of his long answer to
this grotesque accusation appears in a letter of Mrs. Browning’s, probably
written in the course of the winter of 1859-60.

‘. . . My brother George sent me a number of the “National Magazine” with
my face in it, after Marshall Wood’s medallion. My comfort is that my
greatest enemy will not take it to be like me, only that does not go far
with the indifferent public: the portrait I suppose will have its due
weight in arresting the sale of “Aurora Leigh” from henceforth. You never
saw a more determined visage of a strong-minded woman with the neck of a
vicious bull. . . . Still, I am surprised, I own, at the amount of
success, and that golden-hearted Robert is in ecstasies about it, far more
than if it all related to a book of his own. The form of the story, and
also, something in the philosophy, seem to have caught the crowd. As to
the poetry by itself, anything good in that repels rather. I am not so
blind as Romney, not to perceive this . . . Give Peni’s and my love to the
dearest ‘nonno’ (grandfather) whose sublime unselfishness and want of
common egotism presents such a contrast to what is here. Tell him I often
think of him, and always with touched feeling. (When he is
eighty-six or ninety-six, nobody will be pained or humbled by the
spectacle of an insane self-love resulting from a long life’s ungoverned
will.) May God bless him!—. . . Robert has made his third bust
copied from the antique. He breaks them all up as they are finished—it’s
only matter of education. When the power of execution is achieved, he will
try at something original. Then reading hurts him; as long as I have known
him he has not been able to read long at a time—he can do it now
better than at the beginning. The consequence of which is that an active
occupation is salvation to him. . . . Nobody exactly understands him
except me, who am in the inside of him and hear him breathe. For the
peculiarity of our relation is, that he thinks aloud with me and can’t
stop himself. . . . I wanted his poems done this winter very much, and
here was a bright room with three windows consecrated to his use. But he
had a room all last summer, and did nothing. Then, he worked himself out
by riding for three or four hours together—there has been little
poetry done since last winter, when he did much. He was not inclined to
write this winter. The modelling combines body-work and soul-work, and the
more tired he has been, and the more his back ached, poor fellow, the more
he has exulted and been happy. So I couldn’t be much in opposition against
the sculpture—I couldn’t in fact at all. He has material for a
volume, and will work at it this summer, he says.

‘His power is much in advance of “Strafford”, which is his poorest work of
art. Ah, the brain stratifies and matures, even in the pauses of the pen.

‘At the same time, his treatment in England affects him, naturally, and
for my part I set it down as an infamy of that public—no other word.
He says he has told you some things you had not heard, and which I
acknowledge I always try to prevent him from repeating to anyone. I wonder
if he has told you besides (no, I fancy not) that an English lady of rank,
an acquaintance of ours, (observe that!) asked, the other day, the
American minister, whether “Robert was not an American.” The minister
answered—”is it possible that you ask me this? Why, there is
not so poor a village in the United States, where they would not tell you
that Robert Browning was an Englishman, and that they were sorry he was
not an American.” Very pretty of the American minister, was it not?—and
literally true, besides. . . . Ah, dear Sarianna—I don’t complain
for myself of an unappreciating public. I have no reason. But, just
for that reason, I complain more about Robert—only he does
not hear me complain—to you I may say, that the blindness,
deafness and stupidity of the English public to Robert are amazing. Of
course Milsand had heard his name—well the contrary would have been
strange. Robert is. All England can’t prevent his existence, I
suppose. But nobody there, except a small knot of pre-Raffaellite men,
pretend to do him justice. Mr. Forster has done the best,—in the
press. As a sort of lion, Robert has his range in society—and—for
the rest, you should see Chapman’s returns!—While, in America he is
a power, a writer, a poet—he is read—he lives in the hearts of
the people.

‘”Browning readings” here in Boston—”Browning evenings” there. For
the rest, the English hunt lions, too, Sarianna, but their lions are
chiefly chosen among lords and railway kings. . . .’

We cannot be surprised at Mrs. Browning’s desire for a more sustained
literary activity on her husband’s part. We learn from his own subsequent
correspondence that he too regarded the persevering exercise of his poetic
faculty as almost a religious obligation. But it becomes the more apparent
that the restlessness under which he was now labouring was its own excuse;
and that its causes can have been no mystery even to those ‘outside’ him.
The life and climate of Italy were beginning to undermine his strength. We
owe it perhaps to the great and sorrowful change, which was then drawing
near, that the full power of work returned to him.

During the winter of 1859-60, Mr. Val Prinsep was in Rome. He had gone to
Siena with Mr. Burne Jones, bearing an introduction from Rossetti to Mr.
Browning and his wife; and the acquaintance with them was renewed in the
ensuing months. Mr. Prinsep had acquired much knowledge of the popular,
hence picturesque aspects of Roman life, through a French artist long
resident in the city; and by the help of the two young men Mr. Browning
was also introduced to them. The assertion that during his married life he
never dined away from home must be so far modified, that he sometimes
joined Mr. Prinsep and his friend in a Bohemian meal, at an inn near the
Porta Pinciana which they much frequented; and he gained in this manner
some distinctive experiences which he liked long afterwards to recall. I
am again indebted to Mr. Prinsep for a description of some of these.

‘The first time he honoured us was on an evening when the poet of the
quarter of the “Monte” had announced his intention of coming to challenge
a rival poet to a poetical contest. Such contests are, or were, common in
Rome. In old times the Monte and the Trastevere, the two great quarters of
the eternal city, held their meetings on the Ponte Rotto. The contests
were not confined to the effusions of the poetical muse. Sometimes it was
a strife between two lute-players, sometimes guitarists would engage, and
sometimes mere wrestlers. The rivalry was so keen that the adverse parties
finished up with a general fight. So the Papal Government had forbidden
the meetings on the old bridge. But still each quarter had its pet
champions, who were wont to meet in private before an appreciative, but
less excitable audience, than in olden times.

‘Gigi (the host) had furnished a first-rate dinner, and his usual tap of
excellent wine. (‘Vino del Popolo’ he called it.) The ‘Osteria’ had
filled; the combatants were placed opposite each other on either side of a
small table on which stood two ‘mezzi’—long glass bottles holding
about a quart apiece. For a moment the two poets eyed each other like two
cocks seeking an opportunity to engage. Then through the crowd a stalwart
carpenter, a constant attendant of Gigi’s, elbowed his way. He leaned over
the table with a hand on each shoulder, and in a neatly turned couplet he
then addressed the rival bards.

‘”You two,” he said, “for the honour of Rome, must do your best, for there
is now listening to you a great Poet from England.”

‘Having said this, he bowed to Browning, and swaggered back to his place
in the crowd, amid the applause of the on-lookers.

‘It is not necessary to recount how the two Improvisatori poetized, even
if I remembered, which I do not.

‘On another occasion, when Browning and Story were dining with us, we had
a little orchestra (mandolins, two guitars, and a lute,) to play to us.
The music consisted chiefly of well-known popular airs. While they were
playing with great fervour the Hymn to Garibaldi—an air strictly
forbidden by the Papal Government, three blows at the door resounded
through the ‘Osteria’. The music stopped in a moment. I saw Gigi was very
pale as he walked down the room. There was a short parley at the door. It
opened, and a sergeant and two Papal gendarmes marched solemnly up to the
counter from which drink was supplied. There was a dead silence while Gigi
supplied them with large measures of wine, which the gendarmes leisurely
imbibed. Then as solemnly they marched out again, with their heads well in
the air, looking neither to the right nor the left. Most discreet if not
incorruptible guardians of the peace! When the door was shut the music
began again; but Gigi was so earnest in his protestations, that my friend
Browning suggested we should get into carriages and drive to see the
Coliseum by moonlight. And so we sallied forth, to the great relief of
poor Gigi, to whom it meant, if reported, several months of imprisonment,
and complete ruin.

‘In after-years Browning frequently recounted with delight this night
march.

‘”We drove down the Corso in two carriages,” he would say. “In one were
our musicians, in the other we sat. Yes! and the people all asked, ‘who
are these who make all this parade?’ At last some one said, ‘Without doubt
these are the fellows who won the lottery,’ and everybody cried, ‘Of
course these are the lucky men who have won.'”‘

The two persons whom Mr. Browning saw most, and most intimately, during
this and the ensuing winter, were probably Mr. and Mrs. Story. Allusion
has already been made to the opening of the acquaintance at the Baths of
Lucca in 1853, to its continuance in Rome in ’53 and ’54, and to the
artistic pursuits which then brought the two men into close and frequent
contact with each other. These friendly relations were cemented by their
children, who were of about the same age; and after Mrs. Browning’s death,
Miss Browning took her place in the pleasant intercourse which renewed
itself whenever their respective visits to Italy and to England again
brought the two families together. A no less lasting and truly
affectionate intimacy was now also growing up with Mr. Cartwright and his
wife—the Cartwrights (of Aynhoe) of whom mention was made in the
Siena letter to F. Leighton; and this too was subsequently to include
their daughter, now Mrs. Guy Le Strange, and Mr. Browning’s sister. I
cannot quite ascertain when the poet first knew Mr. Odo Russell, and his
mother, Lady William Russell, who was also during this, or at all events
the following winter, in Rome; and whom afterwards in London he regularly
visited until her death; but the acquaintance was already entering on the
stage in which it would spread as a matter of course through every branch
of the family. His first country visit, when he had returned to England,
was paid with his son to Woburn Abbey.

We are now indeed fully confronted with one of the great difficulties of
Mr. Browning’s biography: that of giving a sufficient idea of the growing
extent and growing variety of his social relations. It is evident from the
fragments of his wife’s correspondence that during, as well as after, his
married life, he always and everywhere knew everyone whom it could
interest him to know. These acquaintances constantly ripened into
friendliness, friendliness into friendship. They were necessarily often
marked by interesting circumstances or distinctive character. To follow
them one by one, would add not chapters, but volumes, to our history. The
time has not yet come at which this could even be undertaken; and any
attempt at systematic selection would create a false impression of the
whole. I must therefore be still content to touch upon such passages of
Mr. Browning’s social experience as lie in the course of a comparatively
brief record; leaving all such as are not directly included in it to speak
indirectly for themselves.

Mrs. Browning writes again, in 1859:

‘Massimo d’Azeglio came to see us, and talked nobly, with that noble head
of his. I was far prouder of his coming than of another personal
distinction you will guess at,* though I don’t pretend to have been
insensible to that.’

Dr.—afterwards Cardinal—Manning was also among the
distinguished or interesting persons whom they knew in Rome.

Another, undated extract might refer to the early summer of 1859 or 1860,
when a meeting with the father and sister must have been once more in
contemplation.

Casa Guidi.

‘My dearest Sarianna,—I am delighted to say that we have arrived,
and see our dear Florence—the Queen of Italy, after all . . . A
comfort is that Robert is considered here to be looking better than he
ever was known to look—and this, notwithstanding the greyness of his
beard . . . which indeed, is, in my own mind, very becoming to him, the
argentine touch giving a character of elevation and thought to the whole
physiognomy. This greyness was suddenly developed—let me tell you
how. He was in a state of bilious irritability on the morning of his
arrival in Rome, from exposure to the sun or some such cause, and in a fit
of suicidal impatience shaved away his whole beard . . . whiskers and
all!! I cried when I saw him, I was so horror-struck. I might have
gone into hysterics and still been reasonable—for no human being was
ever so disfigured by so simple an act. Of course I said when I recovered
heart and voice, that everything was at an end between him and me if he
didn’t let it all grow again directly, and (upon the further advice of his
looking-glass) he yielded the point,—and the beard grew—but it
grew white—which was the just punishment of the gods—our sins
leave their traces.

‘Well, poor darling Robert won’t shock you after all—you can’t
choose but be satisfied with his looks. M. de Monclar swore to me that he
was not changed for the intermediate years. . . .’

The family returned, however, to Siena for the summer of 1860, and from
thence Mrs. Browning writes to her sister-in-law of her great anxiety
concerning her sister Henrietta, Mrs. Surtees Cook,* then attacked by a
fatal disease.

‘. . . There is nothing or little to add to my last account of my precious
Henrietta. But, dear, you think the evil less than it is—be sure
that the fear is too reasonable. I am of a very hopeful temperament, and I
never could go on systematically making the worst of any case. I bear up
here for a few days, and then comes the expectation of a letter, which is
hard. I fight with it for Robert’s sake, but all the work I put myself to
do does not hinder a certain effect. She is confined to her bed almost
wholly and suffers acutely. . . . In fact, I am living from day to day, on
the merest crumbs of hope—on the daily bread which is very bitter.
Of course it has shaken me a good deal, and interfered with the advantages
of the summer, but that’s the least. Poor Robert’s scheme for me of
perfect repose has scarcely been carried out. . . .’

This anxiety was heightened during the ensuing winter in Rome, by just the
circumstance from which some comfort had been expected—the second
postal delivery which took place every day; for the hopes and fears which
might have found a moment’s forgetfulness in the longer absence of news,
were, as it proved, kept at fever-heat. On one critical occasion the
suspense became unbearable, because Mr. Browning, by his wife’s desire,
had telegraphed for news, begging for a telegraphic answer. No answer had
come, and she felt convinced that the worst had happened, and that the
brother to whom the message was addressed could not make up his mind to
convey the fact in so abrupt a form. The telegram had been stopped by the
authorities, because Mr. Odo Russell had undertaken to forward it, and his
position in Rome, besides the known Liberal sympathies of Mr. and Mrs.
Browning and himself, had laid it open to political suspicion.

Mrs. Surtees Cook died in the course of the winter. Mr. Browning always
believed that the shock and sorrow of this event had shortened his wife’s
life, though it is also possible that her already lowered vitality
increased the dejection into which it plunged her. Her own casual
allusions to the state of her health had long marked arrested progress, if
not steady decline. We are told, though this may have been a mistake, that
active signs of consumption were apparent in her even before the illness
of 1859, which was in a certain sense the beginning of the end. She was
completely an invalid, as well as entirely a recluse, during the greater
part if not the whole of this last stay in Rome.

She rallied nevertheless sufficiently to write to Miss Browning in April,
in a tone fully suggestive of normal health and energy.

‘. . . In my own opinion he is infinitely handsomer and more attractive
than when I saw him first, sixteen years ago. . . . I believe people in
general would think the same exactly. As to the modelling—well, I
told you that I grudged a little the time from his own particular art. But
it does not do to dishearten him about his modelling. He has given a great
deal of time to anatomy with reference to the expression of form, and the
clay is only the new medium which takes the place of drawing. Also, Robert
is peculiar in his ways of work as a poet. I have struggled a little with
him on this point, for I don’t think him right; that is to say, it would
not be right for me . . . But Robert waits for an inclination, works by
fits and starts; he can’t do otherwise he says, and his head is full of
ideas which are to come out in clay or marble. I yearn for the poems, but
he leaves that to me for the present. . . . You will think Robert looking
very well when you see him; indeed, you may judge by the photographs
meanwhile. You know, Sarianna, how I used to forbid the moustache. I
insisted as long as I could, but all artists were against me, and I
suppose that the bare upper lip does not harmonise with the beard. He
keeps the hair now closer, and the beard is pointed. . . . As to the moony
whiteness of the beard, it is beautiful, I think, but then I think
him all beautiful, and always. . . .’

Mr. Browning’s old friend, Madame du Quaire,* came to Rome in December.
She had visited Florence three years before, and I am indebted to her for
some details of the spiritualist controversy by which its English colony
was at that time divided. She was now a widow, travelling with her
brother; and Mr. Browning came whenever he could, to comfort her in her
sorrow, and, as she says, discourse of nature, art, the beautiful, and all
that ‘conquers death’. He little knew how soon he would need the same
comfort for himself. He would also declaim passages from his wife’s poems;
and when, on one of these occasions, Madame du Quaire had said, as so many
persons now say, that she much preferred his poetry to hers, he made this
characteristic answer, to be repeated in substance some years afterwards
to another friend: ‘You are wrong—quite wrong—she has genius;
I am only a painstaking fellow. Can’t you imagine a clever sort of angel
who plots and plans, and tries to build up something—he wants to
make you see it as he sees it—shows you one point of view, carries
you off to another, hammering into your head the thing he wants you to
understand; and whilst this bother is going on God Almighty turns you off
a little star—that’s the difference between us. The true creative
power is hers, not mine.’

Mrs. Browning died at Casa Guidi on June 29, 1861, soon after their return
to Florence. She had had a return of the bronchial affection to which she
was subject; and a new doctor who was called in discovered grave mischief
at the lungs, which she herself had long believed to be existent or
impending. But the attack was comparatively, indeed actually, slight; and
an extract from her last letter to Miss Browning, dated June 7, confirms
what her family and friends have since asserted, that it was the death of
Cavour which gave her the final blow.

‘. . . We come home into a cloud here. I can scarcely command voice or
hand to name ‘Cavour’. That great soul which meditated and made Italy has
gone to the diviner Country. If tears or blood could have saved him to us,
he should have had mine. I feel yet as if I could scarcely comprehend the
greatness of the vacancy. A hundred Garibaldis for such a man!’

Her death was signalized by the appearance—this time, I am told,
unexpected—of another brilliant comet, which passed so near the
earth as to come into contact with it.

Chapter 14

1861-1863

Miss Blagden—Letters from Mr. Browning to Miss Haworth and Mr.
Leighton—His Feeling in regard to Funeral Ceremonies—Establishment
in London—Plan of Life—Letter to Madame du Quaire—Miss
Arabel Barrett—Biarritz—Letters to Miss Blagden—Conception
of ‘The Ring and the Book’—Biographical Indiscretion—New
Edition of his Works—Mr. and Mrs. Procter.

The friend who was nearest, at all events most helpful, to Mr. Browning in
this great and sudden sorrow was Miss Blagden—Isa Blagden, as she
was called by all her intimates. Only a passing allusion to her could
hitherto find place in this fragmentary record of the Poet’s life; but the
friendship which had long subsisted between her and Mrs. Browning brings
her now into closer and more frequent relation to it. She was for many
years a centre of English society in Florence; for her genial, hospitable
nature, as well as literary tastes (she wrote one or two novels, I believe
not without merit), secured her the acquaintance of many interesting
persons, some of whom occasionally made her house their home; and the
evenings spent with her at her villa on Bellosguardo live pleasantly in
the remembrance of those of our older generation who were permitted to
share in them.

She carried the boy away from the house of mourning, and induced his
father to spend his nights under her roof, while the last painful duties
detained him in Florence. He at least gave her cause to deny, what has
been so often affirmed, that great griefs are necessarily silent. She
always spoke of this period as her ‘apocalyptic month’, so deeply poetic
were the ravings which alternated with the simple human cry of the
desolate heart: ‘I want her, I want her!’ But the ear which received these
utterances has long been closed in death. The only written outbursts of
Mr. Browning’s frantic sorrow were addressed, I believe, to his sister,
and to the friend, Madame du Quaire, whose own recent loss most naturally
invoked them, and who has since thought best, so far as rested with her,
to destroy the letters in which they were contained. It is enough to know
by simple statement that he then suffered as he did. Life conquers Death
for most of us; whether or not ‘nature, art, and beauty’ assist in the
conquest. It was bound to conquer in Mr. Browning’s case: first through
his many-sided vitality; and secondly, through the special motive for
living and striving which remained to him in his son. This note is struck
in two letters which are given me to publish, written about three weeks
after Mrs. Browning’s death; and we see also that by this time his manhood
was reacting against the blow, and bracing itself with such consoling
remembrance as the peace and painlessness of his wife’s last moments could
afford to him.

Florence: July 19, ’61.

Dear Leighton,—It is like your old kindness to write to me and to
say what you do—I know you feel for me. I can’t write about it—but
there were many alleviating circumstances that you shall know one day—there
seemed no pain, and (what she would have felt most) the knowledge of
separation from us was spared her. I find these things a comfort indeed.

I shall go away from Italy for many a year—to Paris, then London for
a day or two just to talk with her sister—but if I can see you it
will be a great satisfaction. Don’t fancy I am ‘prostrated’, I have enough
to do for the boy and myself in carrying out her wishes. He is better than
one would have thought, and behaves dearly to me. Everybody has been very
kind.

Tell dear Mrs. Sartoris that I know her heart and thank her with all mine.
After my day or two at London I shall go to some quiet place in France to
get right again and then stay some time at Paris in order to find out
leisurely what it will be best to do for Peni—but eventually I shall
go to England, I suppose. I don’t mean to live with anybody, even my own
family, but to occupy myself thoroughly, seeing dear friends, however,
like you. God bless you. Yours ever affectionately, Robert Browning.

The second is addressed to Miss Haworth.

Florence: July 20, 1861.

My dear Friend,—I well know you feel as you say, for her once and
for me now. Isa Blagden, perfect in all kindness to me, will have told you
something perhaps—and one day I shall see you and be able to tell
you myself as much as I can. The main comfort is that she suffered very
little pain, none beside that ordinarily attending the simple attacks of
cold and cough she was subject to—had no presentiment of the result
whatever, and was consequently spared the misery of knowing she was about
to leave us; she was smilingly assuring me she was ‘better’, ‘quite
comfortable—if I would but come to bed,’ to within a few minutes of
the last. I think I foreboded evil at Rome, certainly from the beginning
of the week’s illness—but when I reasoned about it, there was no
justifying fear—she said on the last evening ‘it is merely the old
attack, not so severe a one as that of two years ago—there is no
doubt I shall soon recover,’ and we talked over plans for the summer, and
next year. I sent the servants away and her maid to bed—so little
reason for disquietude did there seem. Through the night she slept
heavily, and brokenly—that was the bad sign—but then she would
sit up, take her medicine, say unrepeatable things to me and sleep again.
At four o’clock there were symptoms that alarmed me, I called the maid and
sent for the doctor. She smiled as I proposed to bathe her feet, ‘Well,
you are determined to make an exaggerated case of it!’ Then came
what my heart will keep till I see her again and longer—the most
perfect expression of her love to me within my whole knowledge of her.
Always smilingly, happily, and with a face like a girl’s—and in a
few minutes she died in my arms; her head on my cheek. These incidents so
sustain me that I tell them to her beloved ones as their right: there was
no lingering, nor acute pain, nor consciousness of separation, but God
took her to himself as you would lift a sleeping child from a dark, uneasy
bed into your arms and the light. Thank God. Annunziata thought by her
earnest ways with me, happy and smiling as they were, that she must have
been aware of our parting’s approach—but she was quite conscious,
had words at command, and yet did not even speak of Peni, who was in the
next room. Her last word was when I asked ‘How do you feel?’ —’Beautiful.’
You know I have her dearest wishes and interests to attend to at once—her
child to care for, educate, establish properly; and my own life to fulfil
as properly,—all just as she would require were she here. I shall
leave Italy altogether for years—go to London for a few days’ talk
with Arabel—then go to my father and begin to try leisurely what
will be the best for Peni—but no more ‘housekeeping’ for me, even
with my family. I shall grow, still, I hope—but my root is taken and
remains.

I know you always loved her, and me too in my degree. I shall always be
grateful to those who loved her, and that, I repeat, you did.

She was, and is, lamented with extraordinary demonstrations, if one
consider it. The Italians seem to have understood her by an instinct. I
have received strange kindness from everybody. Pen is very well—very
dear and good, anxious to comfort me as he calls it. He can’t know his
loss yet. After years, his will be worse than mine—he will want what
he never had—that is, for the time when he could be helped by her
wisdom, and genius and piety—I have had everything and shall
not forget.

God bless you, dear friend. I believe I shall set out in a week. Isa goes
with me—dear, true heart. You, too, would do what you could for us
were you here and your assistance needful. A letter from you came a day or
two before the end—she made me enquire about the Frescobaldi Palace
for you,—Isa wrote to you in consequence. I shall be heard of at
151, rue de Grenelle St. Germain. Faithfully and affectionately yours,
Robert Browning.

The first of these displays even more self-control, it might be thought
less feeling, than the second; but it illustrates the reserve which, I
believe, habitually characterized Mr. Browning’s attitude towards men. His
natural, and certainly most complete, confidants were women. At about the
end of July he left Florence with his son; also accompanied by Miss
Blagden, who travelled with them as far as Paris. She herself must soon
have returned to Italy; since he wrote to her in September on the subject
of his wife’s provisional disinterment,* in a manner which shows her to
have been on the spot.

Sept. ’61.

‘. . . Isa, may I ask you one favour? Will you, whenever these dreadful
preliminaries, the provisional removement &c. when they are proceeded
with,—will you do—all you can—suggest every regard to
decency and proper feeling to the persons concerned? I have a horror of
that man of the grave-yard, and needless publicity and exposure—I
rely on you, dearest friend of ours, to at least lend us your influence
when the time shall come—a word may be invaluable. If there is any
show made, or gratification of strangers’ curiosity, far better that I had
left the turf untouched. These things occur through sheer thoughtlessness,
carelessness, not anything worse, but the effect is irreparable. I won’t
think any more of it—now—at least. . . .’

The dread expressed in this letter of any offence to the delicacies of the
occasion was too natural to be remarked upon here; but it connects itself
with an habitual aversion for the paraphernalia of death, which was a
marked peculiarity of Mr. Browning’s nature. He shrank, as his wife had
done, from the ‘earth side’ of the portentous change; but truth compels me
to own that her infinite pity had little or no part in his attitude
towards it. For him, a body from which the soul had passed, held nothing
of the person whose earthly vesture it had been. He had no sympathy for
the still human tenderness with which so many of us regard the mortal
remains of those they have loved, or with the solemn or friendly interest
in which that tenderness so often reflects itself in more neutral minds.
He would claim all respect for the corpse, but he would turn away from it.
Another aspect of this feeling shows itself in a letter to one of his
brothers-in-law, Mr. George Moulton-Barrett, in reference to his wife’s
monument, with which Mr. Barrett had professed himself pleased. His tone
is characterized by an almost religious reverence for the memory which
that monument enshrines. He nevertheless writes:

‘I hope to see it one day—and, although I have no kind of concern as
to where the old clothes of myself shall be thrown, yet, if my fortune be
such, and my survivors be not unduly troubled, I should like them to lie
in the place I have retained there. It is no matter, however.’

The letter is dated October 19, 1866. He never saw Florence again.

Mr. Browning spent two months with his father and sister at St.-Enogat,
near Dinard, from which place the letter to Miss Blagden was written; and
then proceeded to London, where his wife’s sister, Miss Arabel Barrett,
was living. He had declared in his first grief that he would never keep
house again, and he began his solitary life in lodgings which at his
request she had engaged for him; but the discomfort of this arrangement
soon wearied him of it; and before many months had passed, he had sent to
Florence for his furniture, and settled himself in the house in Warwick
Crescent, which possessed, besides other advantages, that of being close
to Delamere Terrace, where Miss Barrett had taken up her abode.

This first period of Mr. Browning’s widowed life was one of unutterable
dreariness, in which the smallest and yet most unconquerable element was
the prosaic ugliness of everything which surrounded him. It was fifteen
years since he had spent a winter in England; he had never spent one in
London. There had been nothing to break for him the transition from the
stately beauty of Florence to the impressions and associations of the
Harrow and Edgware Roads, and of Paddington Green. He might have escaped
this neighbourhood by way of Westbourne Terrace; but his walks constantly
led him in an easterly direction; and whether in an unconscious hugging of
his chains, or, as was more probable, from the desire to save time, he
would drag his aching heart and reluctant body through the sordidness or
the squalor of this short cut, rather than seek the pleasanter
thoroughfares which were open to him. Even the prettiness of Warwick
Crescent was neutralized for him by the atmosphere of low or ugly life
which encompassed it on almost every side. His haunting dream was one day
to have done with it all; to have fulfilled his mission with his son,
educated him, launched him in a suitable career, and to go back to
sunshine and beauty again. He learned by degrees to regard London as a
home; as the only fitting centre for the varied energies which were
reviving in him; to feel pride and pleasure in its increasingly
picturesque character. He even learned to appreciate the outlook from his
house—that ‘second from the bridge’ of which so curious a
presentment had entered into one of the poems of the ‘Men and Women’*—in
spite of the refuse of humanity which would sometimes yell at the street
corner, or fling stones at his plate-glass. But all this had to come; and
it is only fair to admit that twenty-nine years ago the beauties of which
I have spoken were in great measure to come also. He could not then in any
mood have exclaimed, as he did to a friend two or three years ago: ‘Shall
we not have a pretty London if things go on in this way?’ They were
driving on the Kensington side of Hyde Park.

The paternal duty, which, so much against his inclination, had established
Mr. Browning in England, would in every case have lain very near to his
conscience and to his heart; but it especially urged itself upon them
through the absence of any injunction concerning it on his wife’s part. No
farewell words of hers had commended their child to his father’s love and
care; and though he may, for the moment, have imputed this fact to
unconsciousness of her approaching death, his deeper insight soon
construed the silence into an expression of trust, more binding upon him
than the most earnest exacted promise could have been. The growing boy’s
education occupied a considerable part of his time and thoughts, for he
had determined not to send him to school, but, as far as possible, himself
prepare him for the University. He must also, in some degree, have
supervised his recreations. He had therefore, for the present, little
leisure for social distractions, and probably at first very little
inclination for them. His plan of life and duty, and the sense of
responsibility attendant on it, had been communicated to Madame du Quaire
in a letter written also from St.-Enogat.

M. Chauvin, St.-Enogat pres Dinard, Ile et Vilaine: Aug. 17, ’61.

Dear Madame du Quaire,—I got your note on Sunday afternoon, but
found myself unable to call on you as I had been intending to do. Next
morning I left for this place (near St.-Malo, but I give what they say is
the proper address). I want first to beg you to forgive my withholding so
long your little oval mirror—it is safe in Paris, and I am vexed at
having stupidly forgotten to bring it when I tried to see you. I shall
stay here till the autumn sets in, then return to Paris for a few days—the
first of which will be the best, if I can see you in the course of it—afterward,
I settle in London.

When I meant to pass the winter in Paris, I hoped, the first thing almost,
to be near you—it now seems to me, however, that the best course for
the Boy is to begin a good English education at once. I shall take quiet
lodgings (somewhere near Kensington Gardens, I rather think) and get a
Tutor. I want, if I can (according to my present very imperfect knowledge)
to get the poor little fellow fit for the University without passing thro’
a Public School. I, myself, could never have done much by either process,
but he is made differently—imitates and emulates and all that. How I
should be grateful if you would help me by any word that should occur to
you! I may easily do wrong, begin ill, thro’ too much anxiety—perhaps,
however, all may be easier than seems to me just now.

I shall have a great comfort in talking to you—this writing is
stiff, ineffectual work. Pen is very well, cheerful now,—has his
little horse here. The place is singularly unspoiled, fresh and
picturesque, and lovely to heart’s content. I wish you were here!—and
if you knew exactly what such a wish means, you would need no assuring in
addition that I am Yours affectionately and gratefully ever Robert
Browning.

The person of whom he saw most was his sister-in-law, whom he visited, I
believe, every evening. Miss Barrett had been a favourite sister of Mrs.
Browning’s, and this constituted a sufficient title to her husband’s
affection. But she was also a woman to be loved for her own sake. Deeply
religious and very charitable, she devoted herself to visiting the poor—a
form of philanthropy which was then neither so widespread nor so
fashionable as it has since become; and she founded, in 1850, the first
Training School or Refuge which had ever existed for destitute little
girls. It need hardly be added that Mr. and Miss Browning co-operated in
the work. The little poem, ‘The Twins’, republished in 1855 in ‘Men and
Women’, was first printed (with Mrs. Browning’s ‘Plea for the Ragged
Schools of London’) for the benefit of this Refuge. It was in Miss
Barrett’s company that Mr. Browning used to attend the church of Mr.
Thomas Jones, to a volume of whose ‘Sermons and Addresses’ he wrote a
short introduction in 1884.

On February 15, 1862, he writes again to Miss Blagden.

Feb. 15, ’62.

‘. . . While I write, my heart is sore for a great calamity just befallen
poor Rossetti, which I only heard of last night—his wife, who had
been, as an invalid, in the habit of taking laudanum, swallowed an
overdose—was found by the poor fellow on his return from the
working-men’s class in the evening, under the effects of it—help was
called in, the stomach-pump used; but she died in the night, about a week
ago. There has hardly been a day when I have not thought, “if I can,
to-morrow, I will go and see him, and thank him for his book, and return
his sister’s poems.” Poor, dear fellow! . . .

‘. . . Have I not written a long letter, for me who hate the sight of a
pen now, and see a pile of unanswered things on the table before me?
—on this very table. Do you tell me in turn all about yourself. I
shall be interested in the minutest thing you put down. What sort of
weather is it? You cannot but be better at your new villa than in the
large solitary one. There I am again, going up the winding way to it, and
seeing the herbs in red flower, and the butterflies on the top of the wall
under the olive-trees! Once more, good-bye. . . .’

The hatred of writing of which he here speaks refers probably to the class
of letters which he had lately been called upon to answer, and which must
have been painful in proportion to the kindness by which they were
inspired. But it returned to him many years later, in simple weariness of
the mental and mechanical act, and with such force that he would often
answer an unimportant note in person, rather than make the seemingly much
smaller exertion of doing so with his pen. It was the more remarkable
that, with the rarest exceptions, he replied to every letter which came to
him.

The late summer of the former year had been entirely unrefreshing, in
spite of his acknowledgment of the charms of St.-Enogat. There was more
distraction and more soothing in the stay at Cambo and Biarritz, which was
chosen for the holiday of 1862. Years afterwards, when the thought of
Italy carried with it less longing and even more pain, Mr. Browning would
speak of a visit to the Pyrenees, if not a residence among them, as one of
the restful possibilities of his later and freer life. He wrote to Miss
Blagden:

Biarritz, Maison Gastonbide: Sept. 19, ’62.

‘. . . I stayed a month at green pleasant little Cambo, and then came here
from pure inability to go elsewhere—St.-Jean de Luz, on which I had
reckoned, being still fuller of Spaniards who profit by the new railway.
This place is crammed with gay people of whom I see nothing but their
outsides. The sea, sands, and view of the Spanish coast and mountains, are
superb and this house is on the town’s outskirts. I stay till the end of
the month, then go to Paris, and then get my neck back into the old collar
again. Pen has managed to get more enjoyment out of his holiday than
seemed at first likely—there was a nice French family at Cambo with
whom he fraternised, riding with the son and escorting the daughter in her
walks. His red cheeks look as they should. For me, I have got on by having
a great read at Euripides—the one book I brought with me, besides
attending to my own matters, my new poem that is about to be; and of which
the whole is pretty well in my head,—the Roman murder story you
know.

‘. . . How I yearn, yearn for Italy at the close of my life! . . .’

The ‘Roman murder story’ was, I need hardly say, to become ‘The Ring and
the Book’.

It has often been told, though with curious confusion as regards the date,
how Mr. Browning picked up the original parchment-bound record of the
Franceschini case, on a stall of the Piazza San Lorenzo. We read in the
first section of his own work that he plunged instantly into the study of
this record; that he had mastered it by the end of the day; and that he
then stepped out on to the terrace of his house amid the sultry blackness
and silent lightnings of the June night, as the adjacent church of San
Felice sent forth its chants, and voices buzzed in the street below,—and
saw the tragedy as a living picture unfold itself before him. These were
his last days at Casa Guidi. It was four years before he definitely began
the work. The idea of converting the story into a poem cannot even have
occurred to him for some little time, since he offered it for prose
treatment to Miss Ogle, the author of ‘A Lost Love’; and for poetic use, I
am almost certain, to one of his leading contemporaries. It was this slow
process of incubation which gave so much force and distinctness to his
ultimate presentment of the characters; though it infused a large measure
of personal imagination, and, as we shall see, of personal reminiscence,
into their historical truth.

Before ‘The Ring and the Book’ was actually begun, ‘Dramatis Personae’ and
‘In a Balcony’ were to be completed. Their production had been delayed
during Mrs. Browning’s lifetime, and necessarily interrupted by her death;
but we hear of the work as progressing steadily during this summer of
1862.

A painful subject of correspondence had been also for some time engaging
Mr. Browning’s thoughts and pen. A letter to Miss Blagden written January
19, ’63, is so expressive of his continued attitude towards the questions
involved that, in spite of its strong language, his family advise its
publication. The name of the person referred to will alone be omitted.

‘. . . Ever since I set foot in England I have been pestered with
applications for leave to write the Life of my wife—I have refused—and
there an end. I have last week received two communications from friends,
enclosing the letters of a certain . . . of . . ., asking them for details
of life and letters, for a biography he is engaged in—adding, that
he “has secured the correspondence with her old friend . . .” Think of
this beast working away at this, not deeming my feelings or those of her
family worthy of notice—and meaning to print letters written years
and years ago, on the most intimate and personal subjects to an “old
friend”—which, at the poor . . . [friend’s] death fell into the
hands of a complete stranger, who, at once wanted to print them, but
desisted through Ba’s earnest expostulation enforced by my own threat to
take law proceedings—as fortunately letters are copyright. I find
this woman died last year, and her son writes to me this morning that . .
. got them from him as autographs merely—he will try and get them
back. . . , evidently a blackguard, got my letter, which gave him his
deserts, on Saturday—no answer yet,—if none comes, I shall be
forced to advertise in the ‘Times’, and obtain an injunction. But what I
suffer in feeling the hands of these blackguards (for I forgot to say
another man has been making similar applications to friends) what I
undergo with their paws in my very bowels, you can guess, and God knows!
No friend, of course, would ever give up the letters—if anybody ever
is forced to do that which she would have writhed under—if it
ever were necessary, why, I should be forced to do it, and,
with any good to her memory and fame, my own pain in the attempt would be
turned into joy—I should do it at whatever cost: but it is
not only unnecessary but absurdly useless—and, indeed, it shall not
be done if I can stop the scamp’s knavery along with his breath.

‘I am going to reprint the Greek Christian Poets and another essay—nothing
that ought to be published shall be kept back,—and this she
certainly intended to correct, augment, and re-produce—but I
open the doubled-up paper! Warn anyone you may think needs the warning of
the utter distress in which I should be placed were this scoundrel, or any
other of the sort, to baffle me and bring out the letters—I can’t
prevent fools from uttering their folly upon her life, as they do on every
other subject, but the law protects property,—as these letters are.
Only last week, or so, the Bishop of Exeter stopped the publication of an
announced “Life”—containing extracts from his correspondence—and
so I shall do. . . .’

Mr. Browning only resented the exactions of modern biography in the same
degree as most other right-minded persons; but there was, to his thinking,
something specially ungenerous in dragging to light any immature or
unconsidered utterance which the writer’s later judgment would have
disclaimed. Early work was always for him included in this category; and
here it was possible to disagree with him; since the promise of genius has
a legitimate interest from which no distance from its subsequent
fulfilment can detract. But there could be no disagreement as to the
rights and decencies involved in the present case; and, as we hear no more
of the letters to Mr. . . ., we may perhaps assume that their intending
publisher was acting in ignorance, but did not wish to act in defiance, of
Mr. Browning’s feeling in the matter.

In the course of this year, 1863, Mr. Browning brought out, through
Chapman and Hall, the still well-known and well-loved three-volume edition
of his works, including ‘Sordello’, but again excluding ‘Pauline’. A
selection of his poems which appeared somewhat earlier, if we may judge by
the preface, dated November 1862, deserves mention as a tribute to
friendship. The volume had been prepared by John Forster and Bryan Waller
Procter (Barry Cornwall), ‘two friends,’ as the preface states, ‘who from
the first appearance of ‘Paracelsus’ have regarded its writer as among the
few great poets of the century.’ Mr. Browning had long before signalized
his feeling for Barry Cornwall by the dedication of ‘Colombe’s Birthday’.
He discharged the present debt to Mr. Procter, if such there was, by the
attentions which he rendered to his infirm old age. For many years he
visited him every Sunday, in spite of a deafness ultimately so complete
that it was only possible to converse with him in writing. These visits
were afterwards, at her urgent request, continued to Mr. Procter’s widow.

Chapter 15

1863-1869

Pornic—’James Lee’s Wife’—Meeting at Mr. F. Palgrave’s—Letters
to Miss Blagden—His own Estimate of his Work—His Father’s
Illness and Death; Miss Browning—Le Croisic—Academic Honours;
Letter to the Master of Balliol—Death of Miss Barrett—Audierne—Uniform
Edition of his Works—His rising Fame—’Dramatis Personae’—’The
Ring and the Book’; Character of Pompilia.

The most constant contributions to Mr. Browning’s history are supplied
during the next eight or nine years by extracts from his letters to Miss
Blagden. Our next will be dated from Ste.-Marie, near Pornic, where he and
his family again spent their holiday in 1864 and 1865. Some idea of the
life he led there is given at the close of a letter to Frederic Leighton,
August 17, 1863, in which he says:

‘I live upon milk and fruit, bathe daily, do a good morning’s work, read a
little with Pen and somewhat more by myself, go to bed early, and get up
earlyish—rather liking it all.’

This mention of a diet of milk and fruit recalls a favourite habit of Mr.
Browning’s: that of almost renouncing animal food whenever he went abroad.
It was partly promoted by the inferior quality of foreign meat, and showed
no sign of specially agreeing with him, at all events in his later years,
when he habitually returned to England looking thinner and more haggard
than before he left it. But the change was always congenial to his taste.

A fuller picture of these simple, peaceful, and poetic Pornic days comes
to us through Miss Blagden, August 18:

‘. . . This is a wild little place in Brittany, something like that
village where we stayed last year. Close to the sea—a hamlet of a
dozen houses, perfectly lonely—one may walk on the edge of the low
rocks by the sea for miles. Our house is the Mayor’s, large enough, clean
and bare. If I could, I would stay just as I am for many a day. I feel out
of the very earth sometimes as I sit here at the window; with the little
church, a field, a few houses, and the sea. On a weekday there is nobody
in the village, plenty of hay-stacks, cows and fowls; all our butter,
eggs, milk, are produced in the farm-house. Such a soft sea, and such a
mournful wind!

‘I wrote a poem yesterday of 120 lines, and mean to keep writing whether I
like it or not. . . .’

That ‘window’ was the ‘Doorway’ in ‘James Lee’s Wife’. The sea, the field,
and the fig-tree were visible from it.

A long interval in the correspondence, at all events so far as we are
concerned, carries us to the December of 1864, and then Mr. Browning
wrote:

‘. . . on the other hand, I feel such comfort and delight in doing the
best I can with my own object of life, poetry—which, I think, I
never could have seen the good of before, that it shows me I have taken
the root I did take, well. I hope to do much more yet—and
that the flower of it will be put into Her hand somehow. I really have
great opportunities and advantages—on the whole, almost
unprecedented ones—I think, no other disturbances and cares than
those I am most grateful for being allowed to have. . . .’

One of our very few written reminiscences of Mr. Browning’s social life
refers to this year, 1864, and to the evening, February 12, on which he
signed his will in the presence of Mr. Francis Palgrave and Alfred
Tennyson. It is inscribed in the diary of Mr. Thomas Richmond, then
chaplain to St. George’s Hospital; and Mr. Reginald Palgrave has kindly
procured me a copy of it. A brilliant party had met at dinner at the house
of Mr. F. Palgrave, York Gate, Regent’s Park; Mr. Richmond, having
fulfilled a prior engagement, had joined it later. ‘There were, in order,’
he says, ’round the dinner-table (dinner being over), Gifford Palgrave,
Tennyson, Dr. John Ogle, Sir Francis H. Doyle, Frank Palgrave, W. E.
Gladstone, Browning, Sir John Simeon, Monsignor Patterson, Woolner, and
Reginald Palgrave.’

Mr. Richmond closes his entry by saying he will never forget that evening.
The names of those whom it had brought together, almost all to be sooner
or later numbered among the Poet’s friends, were indeed enough to stamp it
as worthy of recollection. One or two characteristic utterances of Mr.
Browning are, however, the only ones which it seems advisable to repeat
here. The conversation having turned on the celebration of the Shakespeare
ter-centenary, he said: ‘Here we are called upon to acknowledge
Shakespeare, we who have him in our very bones and blood, our very selves.
The very recognition of Shakespeare’s merits by the Committee reminds me
of nothing so apt as an illustration, as the decree of the Directoire that
men might acknowledge God.’

Among the subjects discussed was the advisability of making schoolboys
write English verses as well as Latin and Greek. ‘Woolner and Sir Francis
Doyle were for this; Gladstone and Browning against it.’

Work had now found its fitting place in the Poet’s life. It was no longer
the overflow of an irresistible productive energy; it was the deliberate
direction of that energy towards an appointed end. We hear something of
his own feeling concerning this in a letter of August ’65, again from
Ste.-Marie, and called forth by some gossip concerning him which Miss
Blagden had connected with his then growing fame.

‘. . . I suppose that what you call “my fame within these four years”
comes from a little of this gossiping and going about, and showing myself
to be alive: and so indeed some folks say—but I hardly think it: for
remember I was uninterruptedly (almost) in London from the time I
published ‘Paracelsus’ till I ended that string of plays with ‘Luria’—and
I used to go out then, and see far more of merely literary people, critics
&c. than I do now,—but what came of it? There were always a few
people who had a certain opinion of my poems, but nobody cared to speak
what he thought, or the things printed twenty-five years ago would not
have waited so long for a good word; but at last a new set of men arrive
who don’t mind the conventionalities of ignoring one and seeing everything
in another—Chapman says, “the new orders come from Oxford and
Cambridge,” and all my new cultivators are young men—more than that,
I observe that some of my old friends don’t like at all the irruption of
outsiders who rescue me from their sober and private approval, and take
those words out of their mouths “which they always meant to say” and never
did. When there gets to be a general feeling of this kind, that there must
be something in the works of an author, the reviews are obliged to notice
him, such notice as it is—but what poor work, even when doing its
best! I mean poor in the failure to give a general notion of the whole
works; not a particular one of such and such points therein. As I begun,
so I shall end,—taking my own course, pleasing myself or aiming at
doing so, and thereby, I hope, pleasing God.

‘As I never did otherwise, I never had any fear as to what I did going
ultimately to the bad,—hence in collected editions I always
reprinted everything, smallest and greatest. Do you ever see, by the way,
the numbers of the selection which Moxons publish? They are exclusively
poems omitted in that other selection by Forster; it seems little use
sending them to you, but when they are completed, if they give me a few
copies, you shall have one if you like. Just before I left London,
Macmillan was anxious to print a third selection, for his Golden Treasury,
which should of course be different from either—but three
seem too absurd. There—enough of me—

‘I certainly will do my utmost to make the most of my poor self before I
die; for one reason, that I may help old Pen the better; I was much struck
by the kind ways, and interest shown in me by the Oxford undergraduates,—those
introduced to me by Jowett.—I am sure they would be the more helpful
to my son. So, good luck to my great venture, the murder-poem, which I do
hope will strike you and all good lovers of mine. . . .’

We cannot wonder at the touch of bitterness with which Mr. Browning dwells
on the long neglect which he had sustained; but it is at first sight
difficult to reconcile this high positive estimate of the value of his
poetry with the relative depreciation of his own poetic genius which
constantly marks his attitude towards that of his wife. The facts are,
however, quite compatible. He regarded Mrs. Browning’s genius as greater,
because more spontaneous, than his own: owing less to life and its
opportunities; but he judged his own work as the more important, because
of the larger knowledge of life which had entered into its production. He
was wrong in the first terms of his comparison: for he underrated the
creative, hence spontaneous element in his own nature, while claiming
primarily the position of an observant thinker; and he overrated the
amount of creativeness implied by the poetry of his wife. He failed to see
that, given her intellectual endowments, and the lyric gift, the
characteristics of her genius were due to circumstances as much as those
of his own. Actual life is not the only source of poetic inspiration,
though it may perhaps be the best. Mrs. Browning as a poet became what she
was, not in spite of her long seclusion, but by help of it. A touching
paragraph, bearing upon this subject, is dated October ’65.

‘. . . Another thing. I have just been making a selection of Ba’s poems
which is wanted—how I have done it, I can hardly say—it is one
dear delight to know that the work of her goes on more effectually than
ever—her books are more and more read—certainly, sold. A new
edition of Aurora Leigh is completely exhausted within this year. . . .’

Of the thing next dearest to his memory, his Florentine home, he had
written in the January of this year:

‘. . . Yes, Florence will never be my Florence again. To build over
or beside Poggio seems barbarous and inexcusable. The Fiesole side don’t
matter. Are they going to pull the old walls down, or any part of them, I
want to know? Why can’t they keep the old city as a nucleus and build
round and round it, as many rings of houses as they please,—framing
the picture as deeply as they please? Is Casa Guidi to be turned into any
Public Office? I should think that its natural destination. If I am at
liberty to flee away one day, it will not be to Florence, I dare say. As
old Philipson said to me once of Jerusalem—”No, I don’t want to go
there,—I can see it in my head.” . . . Well, goodbye, dearest Isa. I
have been for a few minutes—nay, a good many,—so really with
you in Florence that it would be no wonder if you heard my steps up the
lane to your house. . . .’

Part of a letter written in the September of ’65 from Ste.-Marie may be
interesting as referring to the legend of Pornic included in ‘Dramatis
Personae’.

‘. . . I suppose my “poem” which you say brings me and Pornic together in
your mind, is the one about the poor girl—if so, “fancy” (as I hear
you say) they have pulled down the church since I arrived last month—there
are only the shell-like, roofless walls left, for a few weeks more; it was
very old—built on a natural base of rock—small enough, to be
sure—so they build a smart new one behind it, and down goes this;
just as if they could not have pitched down their brick and stucco farther
away, and left the old place for the fishermen—so here—the
church is even more picturesque—and certain old Norman ornaments,
capitals of pillars and the like, which we left erect in the doorway, are
at this moment in a heap of rubbish by the road-side. The people here are
good, stupid and dirty, without a touch of the sense of picturesqueness in
their clodpolls. . . .’

The little record continues through 1866.

Feb. 19, ’66.

‘. . . I go out a great deal; but have enjoyed nothing so much as a dinner
last week with Tennyson, who, with his wife and one son, is staying in
town for a few weeks,—and she is just what she was and always will
be—very sweet and dear: he seems to me better than ever. I met him
at a large party on Saturday—also Carlyle, whom I never met at a
“drum” before. . . . Pen is drawing our owl—a bird that is the light
of our house, for his tameness and engaging ways. . . .’

May 19, ’66.

‘. . . My father has been unwell,—he is better and will go into the
country the moment the east winds allow,—for in Paris,—as
here,—there is a razor wrapped up in the flannel of sunshine. I hope
to hear presently from my sister, and will tell you if a letter comes: he
is eighty-five, almost,—you see! otherwise his wonderful
constitution would keep me from inordinate apprehension. His mind is
absolutely as I always remember it,—and the other day when I wanted
some information about a point of mediaeval history, he wrote a regular
bookful of notes and extracts thereabout. . . .’

June 20, ’66.

‘My dearest Isa, I was telegraphed for to Paris last week, and arrived
time enough to pass twenty-four hours more with my father: he died on the
14th—quite exhausted by internal haemorrhage, which would have
overcome a man of thirty. He retained all his faculties to the last—was
utterly indifferent to death,—asking with surprise what it was we
were affected about since he was perfectly happy?—and kept his own
strange sweetness of soul to the end—nearly his last words to me, as
I was fanning him, were “I am so afraid that I fatigue you, dear!” this,
while his sufferings were great; for the strength of his constitution
seemed impossible to be subdued. He wanted three weeks exactly to complete
his eighty-fifth year. So passed away this good, unworldly, kind-hearted,
religious man, whose powers natural and acquired would so easily have made
him a notable man, had he known what vanity or ambition or the love of
money or social influence meant. As it is, he was known by half-a-dozen
friends. He was worthy of being Ba’s father—out of the whole world,
only he, so far as my experience goes. She loved him,—and he
said, very recently, while gazing at her portrait, that only that picture
had put into his head that there might be such a thing as the worship of
the images of saints. My sister will come and live with me henceforth. You
see what she loses. All her life has been spent in caring for my mother,
and seventeen years after that, my father. You may be sure she does not
rave and rend hair like people who have plenty to atone for in the past;
but she loses very much. I returned to London last night. . . .’

During his hurried journey to Paris, Mr. Browning was mentally blessing
the Emperor for having abolished the system of passports, and thus enabled
him to reach his father’s bedside in time. His early Italian journeys had
brought him some vexatious experience of the old order of things. Once, at
Venice, he had been mistaken for a well-known Liberal, Dr. Bowring, and
found it almost impossible to get his passport ‘vise’; and, on another
occasion, it aroused suspicion by being ‘too good’; though in what sense I
do not quite remember.

Miss Browning did come to live with her brother, and was thenceforward his
inseparable companion. Her presence with him must therefore be understood
wherever I have had no special reason for mentioning it.

They tried Dinard for the remainder of the summer; but finding it
unsuitable, proceeded by St.-Malo to Le Croisic, the little sea-side town
of south-eastern Brittany which two of Mr. Browning’s poems have since
rendered famous.

The following extract has no date.

Le Croisic, Loire Inferieure.

‘. . . We all found Dinard unsuitable, and after staying a few days at St.
Malo resolved to try this place, and well for us, since it serves our
purpose capitally. . . . We are in the most delicious and peculiar old
house I ever occupied, the oldest in the town—plenty of great rooms—nearly
as much space as in Villa Alberti. The little town, and surrounding
country are wild and primitive, even a trifle beyond Pornic perhaps. Close
by is Batz, a village where the men dress in white from head to foot, with
baggy breeches, and great black flap hats;—opposite is Guerande, the
old capital of Bretagne: you have read about it in Balzac’s ‘Beatrix’,—and
other interesting places are near. The sea is all round our peninsula, and
on the whole I expect we shall like it very much. . . .’

Later.

‘. . . We enjoyed Croisic increasingly to the last—spite of three
weeks’ vile weather, in striking contrast to the golden months at Pornic
last year. I often went to Guerande—once Sarianna and I walked from
it in two hours and something under,—nine miles:—though from
our house, straight over the sands and sea, it is not half the distance. .
. .’

In 1867 Mr. Browning received his first and greatest academic honours. The
M.A. degree by diploma, of the University of Oxford, was conferred on him
in June;* and in the month of October he was made honorary Fellow of
Balliol College. Dr. Jowett allows me to publish the, as he terms it, very
characteristic letter in which he acknowledged the distinction. Dr. Scott,
afterwards Dean of Rochester, was then Master of Balliol.

19, Warwick Crescent: Oct. 21, ’67.

Dear Dr. Scott,—I am altogether unable to say how I feel as to the
fact you communicate to me. I must know more intimately than you can how
little worthy I am of such an honour,—you hardly can set the value
of that honour, you who give, as I who take it.

Indeed, there are both ‘duties and emoluments’ attached to this
position,—duties of deep and lasting gratitude, and emoluments
through which I shall be wealthy my life long. I have at least loved
learning and the learned, and there needed no recognition of my love on
their part to warrant my professing myself, as I do, dear Dr. Scott, yours
ever most faithfully, Robert Browning.

In the following year he received and declined the virtual offer of the
Lord Rectorship of the University of St. Andrews, rendered vacant by the
death of Mr. J. S. Mill.

He returned with his sister to Le Croisic for the summer of 1867.

In June 1868, Miss Arabel Barrett died, of a rheumatic affection of the
heart. As did her sister seven years before, she passed away in Mr.
Browning’s arms. He wrote the event to Miss Blagden as soon as it
occurred, describing also a curious circumstance attendant on it.

19th June, ’68.

‘. . . You know I am not superstitious—here is a note I made in a
book, Tuesday, July 21, 1863. “Arabel told me yesterday that she had been
much agitated by a dream which happened the night before, Sunday, July 19.
She saw Her and asked ‘when shall I be with you?’ the reply was, ‘Dearest,
in five years,’ whereupon Arabella woke. She knew in her dream that it was
not to the living she spoke.”—In five years, within a month of their
completion—I had forgotten the date of the dream, and supposed it
was only three years ago, and that two had still to run. Only a
coincidence, but noticeable. . . .’

In August he writes again from Audierne, Finisterre (Brittany).

‘. . . You never heard of this place, I daresay. After staying a few days
at Paris we started for Rennes,—reached Caen and halted a little—thence
made for Auray, where we made excursions to Carnac, Lokmariaker, and
Ste.-Anne d’Auray; all very interesting of their kind; then saw Brest,
Morlaix, St.-Pol de Leon, and the sea-port Roscoff,—our intended
bathing place—it was full of folk, however, and otherwise
impracticable, so we had nothing for it, but to “rebrousser chemin” and
get to the south-west again. At Quimper we heard (for a second time) that
Audierne would suit us exactly, and to it we came—happily, for
“suit” it certainly does. Look on the map for the most westerly point of
Bretagne—and of the mainland of Europe—there is niched
Audierne, a delightful quite unspoiled little fishing-town, with the open
ocean in front, and beautiful woods, hills and dales, meadows and lanes
behind and around,—sprinkled here and there with villages each with
its fine old Church. Sarianna and I have just returned from a four hours’
walk in the course of which we visited a town, Pont Croix, with a
beautiful cathedral-like building amid the cluster of clean bright Breton
houses,—and a little farther is another church, “Notre Dame de
Comfort”, with only a hovel or two round it, worth the journey from
England to see; we are therefore very well off—at an inn, I should
say, with singularly good, kind, and liberal people, so have no cares for
the moment. May you be doing as well! The weather has been most
propitious, and to-day is perfect to a wish. We bathe, but somewhat
ingloriously, in a smooth creek of mill-pond quietude, (there being no
cabins on the bay itself,) unlike the great rushing waves of Croisic—the
water is much colder. . . .’

The tribute contained in this letter to the merits of le Pere Batifoulier
and his wife would not, I think, be endorsed by the few other English
travellers who have stayed at their inn. The writer’s own genial and
kindly spirit no doubt partly elicited, and still more supplied, the
qualities he saw in them.

The six-volume, so long known as ‘uniform’ edition of Mr. Browning’s
works, was brought out in the autumn of this year by Messrs. Smith, Elder
& Co.; practically Mr. George Murray Smith, who was to be
thenceforward his exclusive publisher and increasingly valued friend. In
the winter months appeared the first two volumes (to be followed in the
ensuing spring by the third and fourth) of ‘The Ring and the Book’.

With ‘The Ring and the Book’ Mr. Browning attained the full recognition of
his genius. The ‘Athenaeum’ spoke of it as the ‘opus magnum’ of the
generation; not merely beyond all parallel the supremest poetic
achievement of the time, but the most precious and profound spiritual
treasure that England had produced since the days of Shakespeare. His
popularity was yet to come, so also the widespread reading of his hitherto
neglected poems; but henceforth whatever he published was sure of ready
acceptance, of just, if not always enthusiastic, appreciation. The ground
had not been gained at a single leap. A passage in another letter to Miss
Blagden shows that, when ‘The Ring and the Book’ appeared, a high place
was already awaiting it outside those higher academic circles in which its
author’s position was secured.

‘. . . I want to get done with my poem. Booksellers are making me pretty
offers for it. One sent to propose, last week, to publish it at his risk,
giving me all the profits, and pay me the whole in advance—”for
the incidental advantages of my name”—the R. B. who for six months
once did not sell one copy of the poems! I ask 200 Pounds for the sheets
to America, and shall get it. . . .’

His presence in England had doubtless stimulated the public interest in
his productions; and we may fairly credit ‘Dramatis Personae’ with having
finally awakened his countrymen of all classes to the fact that a great
creative power had arisen among them. ‘The Ring and the Book’ and
‘Dramatis Personae’ cannot indeed be dissociated in what was the
culminating moment in the author’s poetic life, even more than the zenith
of his literary career. In their expression of all that constituted the
wide range and the characteristic quality of his genius, they at once
support and supplement each other. But a fact of more distinctive
biographical interest connects itself exclusively with the later work.

We cannot read the emotional passages of ‘The Ring and the Book’ without
hearing in them a voice which is not Mr. Browning’s own: an echo, not of
his past, but from it. The remembrance of that past must have accompanied
him through every stage of the great work. Its subject had come to him in
the last days of his greatest happiness. It had lived with him, though in
the background of consciousness, through those of his keenest sorrow. It
was his refuge in that aftertime, in which a subsiding grief often leaves
a deeper sense of isolation. He knew the joy with which his wife would
have witnessed the diligent performance of this his self-imposed task. The
beautiful dedication contained in the first and last books was only a
matter of course. But Mrs. Browning’s spiritual presence on this occasion
was more than a presiding memory of the heart. I am convinced that it
entered largely into the conception of ‘Pompilia’, and, so far as this
depended on it, the character of the whole work. In the outward course of
her history, Mr. Browning proceeded strictly on the ground of fact. His
dramatic conscience would not have allowed it otherwise. He had read the
record of the case, as he has been heard to say, fully eight times over
before converting it into the substance of his poem; and the form in which
he finally cast it, was that which recommended itself to him as true—which,
within certain limits, was true. The testimony of those who watched
by Pompilia’s death-bed is almost conclusive as to the absence of any
criminal motive to her flight, or criminal circumstance connected with it.
Its time proved itself to have been that of her impending, perhaps newly
expected motherhood, and may have had some reference to this fact. But the
real Pompilia was a simple child, who lived in bodily terror of her
husband, and had made repeated efforts to escape from him. Unless my
memory much deceives me, her physical condition plays no part in the
historical defence of her flight. If it appeared there at all, it was as a
merely practical incentive to her striving to place herself in safety. The
sudden rapturous sense of maternity which, in the poetic rendering of the
case, becomes her impulse to self-protection, was beyond her age and her
culture; it was not suggested by the facts; and, what is more striking, it
was not a natural development of Mr. Browning’s imagination concerning
them.

The parental instinct was among the weakest in his nature—a fact
which renders the more conspicuous his devotion to his own son; it finds
little or no expression in his work. The apotheosis of motherhood which he
puts forth through the aged priest in ‘Ivan Ivanovitch’ was due to the
poetic necessity of lifting a ghastly human punishment into the sphere of
Divine retribution. Even in the advancing years which soften the father
into the grandfather, the essential quality of early childhood was not
that which appealed to him. He would admire its flower-like beauty, but
not linger over it. He had no special emotion for its helplessness. When
he was attracted by a child it was through the evidence of something not
only distinct from, but opposed to this. ‘It is the soul’ (I see) ‘in that
speck of a body,’ he said, not many years ago, of a tiny boy—now too
big for it to be desirable that I should mention his name, but whose
mother, if she reads this, will know to whom I allude—who had
delighted him by an act of intelligent grace which seemed beyond his
years. The ingenuously unbounded maternal pride, the almost luscious
maternal sentiment, of Pompilia’s dying moments can only associate
themselves in our mind with Mrs. Browning’s personal utterances, and some
notable passages in ‘Casa Guidi Windows’ and ‘Aurora Leigh’. Even the
exalted fervour of the invocation to Caponsacchi, its blending of
spiritual ecstasy with half-realized earthly emotion, has, I think, no
parallel in her husband’s work.

‘Pompilia’ bears, still, unmistakably, the stamp of her author’s genius.
Only he could have imagined her peculiar form of consciousness; her
childlike, wondering, yet subtle, perception of the anomalies of life. He
has raised the woman in her from the typical to the individual by this
distinguishing touch of his supreme originality; and thus infused into her
character a haunting pathos which renders it to many readers the most
exquisite in the whole range of his creations. For others at the same
time, it fails in the impressiveness because it lacks the reality which
habitually marks them.

So much, however, is certain: Mr. Browning would never have accepted this
‘murder story’ as the subject of a poem, if he could not in some sense
have made it poetical. It was only in an idealized Pompilia that the
material for such a process could be found. We owe it, therefore, to the
one departure from his usual mode of dramatic conception, that the Poet’s
masterpiece has been produced. I know no other instance of what can be
even mistaken for reflected inspiration in the whole range of his work,
the given passages in ‘Pauline’ excepted.

The postscript of a letter to Frederic Leighton written so far back as
October 17, 1864, is interesting in its connection with the preliminary
stages of this great undertaking.

‘A favour, if you have time for it. Go into the church St. Lorenzo in
Lucina in the Corso—and look attentively at it—so as to
describe it to me on your return. The general arrangement of the building,
if with a nave—pillars or not—the number of altars, and any
particularity there may be—over the High Altar is a famous
Crucifixion by Guido. It will be of great use to me. I don’t care about
the outsid.’

Chapter 16

1869-1873

Lord Dufferin; Helen’s Tower—Scotland; Visit to Lady Ashburton—Letters
to Miss Blagden—St.-Aubin; The Franco-Prussian War—’Herve
Riel’—Letter to Mr. G. M. Smith—’Balaustion’s Adventure’;
‘Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau’—’Fifine at the Fair’—Mistaken
Theories of Mr. Browning’s Work—St.-Aubin; ‘Red Cotton Nightcap
Country’.

From 1869 to 1871 Mr. Browning published nothing; but in April 1870 he
wrote the sonnet called ‘Helen’s Tower’, a beautiful tribute to the memory
of Helen, mother of Lord Dufferin, suggested by the memorial tower which
her son was erecting to her on his estate at Clandeboye. The sonnet
appeared in 1883, in the ‘Pall Mall Gazette’, and was reprinted in 1886,
in ‘Sonnets of the Century’, edited by Mr. Sharp; and again in the fifth
part of the Browning Society’s ‘Papers’; but it is still I think
sufficiently little known to justify its reproduction.

April 26, 1870.

Lord Dufferin is a warm admirer of Mr. Browning’s genius. He also held him
in strong personal regard.

In the summer of 1869 the poet, with his sister and son, changed the
manner of his holiday, by joining Mr. Story and his family in a tour in
Scotland, and a visit to Louisa, Lady Ashburton, at Loch Luichart Lodge;
but in the August of 1870 he was again in the primitive atmosphere of a
French fishing village, though one which had little to recommend it but
the society of a friend; it was M. Milsand’s St.-Aubin. He had written,
February 24, to Miss Blagden, under the one inspiration which naturally
recurred in his correspondence with her.

‘. . . So you, too, think of Naples for an eventual resting-place! Yes,
that is the proper basking-ground for “bright and aged snakes.” Florence
would be irritating, and, on the whole, insufferable—Yet I never
hear of any one going thither but my heart is twitched. There is a good,
charming, little singing German lady, Miss Regan, who told me the other
day that she was just about revisiting her aunt, Madame Sabatier, whom you
may know, or know of—and I felt as if I should immensely like to
glide, for a long summer-day through the streets and between the old
stone-walls,—unseen come and unheard go—perhaps by some
miracle, I shall do so—and look up at Villa Brichieri as Arnold’s
Gypsy-Scholar gave one wistful look at “the line of festal light in Christ
Church Hall,” before he went to sleep in some forgotten grange. . . . I am
so glad I can be comfortable in your comfort. I fancy exactly how you feel
and see how you live: it is the Villa Geddes of old days, I find. I
well remember the fine view from the upper room—that looking down
the steep hill, by the side of which runs the road you describe—that
path was always my preferred walk, for its shortness (abruptness) and the
fine old wall to your left (from the Villa) which is overgrown with weeds
and wild flowers—violets and ground-ivy, I remember. Oh, me! to find
myself some late sunshiny Sunday afternoon, with my face turned to
Florence—”ten minutes to the gate, ten minutes home!” I think
I should fairly end it all on the spot. . . .’

He writes again from St.-Aubin, August 19, 1870:

‘Dearest Isa,—Your letter came prosperously to this little wild
place, where we have been, Sarianna and myself, just a week. Milsand lives
in a cottage with a nice bit of garden, two steps off, and we occupy
another of the most primitive kind on the sea-shore—which shore is a
good sandy stretch for miles and miles on either side. I don’t think we
were ever quite so thoroughly washed by the sea-air from all quarters as
here—the weather is fine, and we do well enough. The sadness of the
war and its consequences go far to paralyse all our pleasure, however. . .
.

‘Well, you are at Siena—one of the places I love best to remember.
You are returned—or I would ask you to tell me how the Villa Alberti
wears, and if the fig-tree behind the house is green and strong yet. I
have a pen-and-ink drawing of it, dated and signed the last day Ba was
ever there—”my fig tree—” she used to sit under it, reading
and writing. Nine years, or ten rather, since then! Poor old Landor’s oak,
too, and his cottage, ought not to be forgotten. Exactly opposite this
house,—just over the way of the water,—shines every night the
light-house of Havre—a place I know well, and love very moderately:
but it always gives me a thrill as I see afar, exactly a particular
spot which I was at along with her. At this moment, I see the white streak
of the phare in the sun, from the window where I write and I think.
. . . Milsand went to Paris last week, just before we arrived, to
transport his valuables to a safer place than his house, which is near the
fortifications. He is filled with as much despondency as can be—while
the old dear and perfect kindness remains. I never knew or shall know his
like among men. . . .’

The war did more than sadden Mr. and Miss Browning’s visit to St.-Aubin;
it opposed unlooked-for difficulties to their return home. They had
remained, unconscious of the impending danger, till Sedan had been taken,
the Emperor’s downfall proclaimed, and the country suddenly placed in a
state of siege. One morning M. Milsand came to them in anxious haste, and
insisted on their starting that very day. An order, he said, had been
issued that no native should leave the country, and it only needed some
unusually thick-headed Maire for Mr. Browning to be arrested as a runaway
Frenchman or a Prussian spy. The usual passenger boats from Calais and
Boulogne no longer ran; but there was, he believed, a chance of their
finding one at Havre. They acted on this warning, and discovered its
wisdom in the various hindrances which they found on their way. Everywhere
the horses had been requisitioned for the war. The boat on which they had
relied to take them down the river to Caen had been stopped that very
morning; and when they reached the railroad they were told that the
Prussians would be at the other end before night. At last they arrived at
Honfleur, where they found an English vessel which was about to convey
cattle to Southampton; and in this, setting out at midnight, they made
their passage to England.

Some words addressed to Miss Blagden, written I believe in 1871, once more
strike a touching familiar note.

‘. . . But no, dearest Isa. The simple truth is that she was
the poet, and I the clever person by comparison—remember her limited
experience of all kinds, and what she made of it. Remember on the other
hand, how my uninterrupted health and strength and practice with the world
have helped me. . . .’

‘Balaustion’s Adventure’ and ‘Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau’ were published,
respectively, in August and December 1871. They had been preceded in the
March of the same year by a ballad, ‘Herve Riel’, afterwards reprinted in
the ‘Pacchiarotto’ volume, and which Mr. Browning now sold to the
‘Cornhill Magazine’ for the benefit of the French sufferers by the war.

The circumstances of this little transaction, unique in Mr. Browning’s
experience, are set forth in the following letter:

Feb. 4, ’71.

‘My dear Smith,—I want to give something to the people in Paris, and
can afford so very little just now, that I am forced upon an expedient.
Will you buy of me that poem which poor Simeon praised in a letter you
saw, and which I like better than most things I have done of late?—Buy,—I
mean,—the right of printing it in the Pall Mall and, if you please,
the Cornhill also,—the copyright remaining with me. You remember you
wanted to print it in the Cornhill, and I was obstinate: there is hardly
any occasion on which I should be otherwise, if the printing any poem of
mine in a magazine were purely for my own sake: so, any liberality you
exercise will not be drawn into a precedent against you. I fancy this is a
case in which one may handsomely puff one’s own ware, and I venture to
call my verses good for once. I send them to you directly, because
expedition will render whatever I contribute more valuable: for when you
make up your mind as to how liberally I shall be enabled to give, you must
send me a cheque and I will send the same as the “Product of a Poem”—so
that your light will shine deservedly. Now, begin proceedings by reading
the poem to Mrs. Smith,—by whose judgment I will cheerfully be
bound; and, with her approval, second my endeavour as best you can. Would,—for
the love of France,—that this were a “Song of a Wren”—then
should the guineas equal the lines; as it is, do what you safely may for
the song of a Robin—Browning—who is yours very truly, into the
bargain.

‘P.S. The copy is so clear and careful that you might, with a good Reader,
print it on Monday, nor need my help for corrections: I shall however be
always at home, and ready at a moment’s notice: return the copy, if you
please, as I promised it to my son long ago.’

Mr. Smith gave him 100 guineas as the price of the poem.

He wrote concerning the two longer poems, first probably at the close of
this year, and again in January 1872, to Miss Blagden.

‘. . . By this time you have got my little book (‘Hohenstiel’) and seen
for yourself whether I make the best or worst of the case. I think, in the
main, he meant to do what I say, and, but for weakness,—grown more
apparent in his last years than formerly,—would have done what I say
he did not.* I thought badly of him at the beginning of his career, et
pour cause: better afterward, on the strength of the promises he made,
and gave indications of intending to redeem. I think him very weak in the
last miserable year. At his worst I prefer him to Thiers’ best. I am told
my little thing is succeeding—sold 1,400 in the first five days, and
before any notice appeared. I remember that the year I made the little
rough sketch in Rome, ’60, my account for the last six months with Chapman
was—nil, not one copy disposed of! . . .

‘. . . I am glad you like what the editor of the Edinburgh calls my
eulogium on the second empire,—which it is not, any more than what
another wiseacre affirms it to be “a scandalous attack on the old constant
friend of England”—it is just what I imagine the man might, if he
pleased, say for himself.’

Mr. Browning continues:

‘Spite of my ailments and bewailments I have just all but finished another
poem of quite another kind, which shall amuse you in the spring, I hope! I
don’t go sound asleep at all events. ‘Balaustion’—the second edition
is in the press I think I told you. 2,500 in five months, is a good sale
for the likes of me. But I met Henry Taylor (of Artevelde) two days ago at
dinner, and he said he had never gained anything by his books, which
surely is a shame—I mean, if no buyers mean no readers. . . .’

‘Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau’ was written in Scotland, where Mr. Browning
was the guest of Mr. Ernest Benzon: having left his sister to the care of
M. and Madame Milsand at St.-Aubin. The ailment he speaks of consisted, I
believe, of a severe cold. Another of the occurrences of 1871 was Mr.
Browning’s election as Life Governor of the London University.

A passage from a letter dated March 30, ’72, bears striking testimony to
the constant warmth of his affections.

‘. . . The misfortune, which I did not guess when I accepted the
invitation, is that I shall lose some of the last days of Milsand, who has
been here for the last month: no words can express the love I have for
him, you know. He is increasingly precious to me. . . . Waring came back
the other day, after thirty years’ absence, the same as ever,—nearly.
He has been Prime Minister at New Zealand for a year and a half, but gets
tired, and returns home with a poem.’*

This is my last extract from the correspondence with Miss Blagden. Her
death closed it altogether within the year.

It is difficult to infer from letters, however intimate, the dominant
state of the writer’s mind: most of all to do so in Mr. Browning’s case,
from such passages of his correspondence as circumstances allow me to
quote. Letters written in intimacy, and to the same friend, often express
a recurrent mood, a revived set of associations, which for the moment
destroys the habitual balance of feeling. The same effect is sometimes
produced in personal intercourse; and the more varied the life, the more
versatile the nature, the more readily in either case will a lately unused
spring of emotion well up at the passing touch. We may even fancy we read
into the letters of 1870 that eerie, haunting sadness of a cherished
memory from which, in spite of ourselves, life is bearing us away. We may
also err in so doing. But literary creation, patiently carried on through
a given period, is usually a fair reflection of the general moral and
mental conditions under which it has taken place; and it would be hard to
imagine from Mr. Browning’s work during these last ten years that any but
gracious influences had been operating upon his genius, any more
disturbing element than the sense of privation and loss had entered into
his inner life.

Some leaven of bitterness must, nevertheless, have been working within
him, or he could never have produced that piece of perplexing cynicism,
‘Fifine at the Fair’—the poem referred to as in progress in a letter
to Miss Blagden, and which appeared in the spring of 1872. The disturbing
cause had been also of long standing; for the deeper reactive processes of
Mr. Browning’s nature were as slow as its more superficial response was
swift; and while ‘Dramatis Personae’, ‘The Ring and the Book’, and even
‘Balaustion’s Adventure’, represented the gradually perfected substance of
his poetic imagination, ‘Fifine at the Fair’ was as the froth thrown up by
it during the prolonged simmering which was to leave it clear. The work
displays the iridescent brightness as well as the occasional impurity of
this froth-like character. Beauty and ugliness are, indeed, almost
inseparable in the moral impression which it leaves upon us. The author
has put forth a plea for self-indulgence with a much slighter attempt at
dramatic disguise than his special pleadings generally assume; and while
allowing circumstances to expose the sophistry of the position, and punish
its attendant act, he does not sufficiently condemn it. But, in
identifying himself for the moment with the conception of a Don Juan, he
has infused into it a tenderness and a poetry with which the true type had
very little in common, and which retard its dramatic development. Those
who knew Mr. Browning, or who thoroughly know his work, may censure,
regret, fail to understand ‘Fifine at the Fair’; they will never in any
important sense misconstrue it.

But it has been so misconstrued by an intelligent and not unsympathetic
critic; and his construction may be endorsed by other persons in the
present, and still more in the future, in whom the elements of a truer
judgment are wanting. It seems, therefore, best to protest at once against
the misjudgment, though in so doing I am claiming for it an attention
which it may not seem to deserve. I allude to Mr. Mortimer’s ‘Note on
Browning’ in the ‘Scottish Art Review’ for December 1889. This note
contains a summary of Mr. Browning’s teaching, which it resolves into the
moral equivalent of the doctrine of the conservation of force. Mr.
Mortimer assumes for the purpose of his comparison that the exercise of
force means necessarily moving on; and according to him Mr. Browning
prescribes action at any price, even that of defying the restrictions of
moral law. He thus, we are told, blames the lovers in ‘The Statue and the
Bust’ for their failure to carry out what was an immoral intention; and,
in the person of his ‘Don Juan’, defends a husband’s claim to relieve the
fixity of conjugal affection by varied adventure in the world of temporary
loves: the result being ‘the negation of that convention under which we
habitually view life, but which for some reason or other breaks down when
we have to face the problems of a Goethe, a Shelley, a Byron, or a
Browning.’

Mr. Mortimer’s generalization does not apply to ‘The Statue and the Bust’,
since Mr. Browning has made it perfectly clear that, in this case, the
intended act is postponed without reference to its morality, and simply in
consequence of a weakness of will, which would have been as paralyzing to
a good purpose as it was to the bad one; but it is not without superficial
sanction in ‘Fifine at the Fair’; and the part which the author allowed
himself to play in it did him an injustice only to be measured by the
inference which it has been made to support. There could be no mistake
more ludicrous, were it less regrettable, than that of classing Mr.
Browning, on moral grounds, with Byron or Shelley; even in the case of
Goethe the analogy breaks down. The evidence of the foregoing pages has
rendered all protest superfluous. But the suggested moral resemblance to
the two English poets receives a striking comment in a fact of Mr.
Browning’s life which falls practically into the present period of our
history: his withdrawal from Shelley of the devotion of more than forty
years on account of an act of heartlessness towards his first wife which
he held to have been proved against him.

The sweet and the bitter lay, indeed, very close to each other at the
sources of Mr. Browning’s inspiration. Both proceeded, in great measure,
from his spiritual allegiance to the past—that past by which it was
impossible that he should linger, but which he could not yet leave behind.
The present came to him with friendly greeting. He was unconsciously,
perhaps inevitably, unjust to what it brought. The injustice reacted upon
himself, and developed by degrees into the cynical mood of fancy which
became manifest in ‘Fifine at the Fair’.

It is true that, in the light of this explanation, we see an effect very
unlike its cause; but the chemistry of human emotion is like that of
natural life. It will often form a compound in which neither of its
constituents can be recognized. This perverse poem was the last as well as
the first manifestation of an ungenial mood of Mr. Browning’s mind. A
slight exception may be made for some passages in ‘Red Cotton Nightcap
Country’, and for one of the poems of the ‘Pacchiarotto’ volume; but
otherwise no sign of moral or mental disturbance betrays itself in his
subsequent work. The past and the present gradually assumed for him a more
just relation to each other. He learned to meet life as it offered itself
to him with a more frank recognition of its good gifts, a more grateful
response to them. He grew happier, hence more genial, as the years
advanced.

It was not without misgiving that Mr. Browning published ‘Fifine at the
Fair’; but many years were to pass before he realized the kind of
criticism to which it had exposed him. The belief conveyed in the letter
to Miss Blagden that what proceeds from a genuine inspiration is justified
by it, combined with the indifference to public opinion which had been
engendered in him by its long neglect, made him slow to anticipate the
results of external judgment, even where he was in some degree prepared to
endorse them. For his value as a poet, it was best so.

The August of 1872 and of 1873 again found him with his sister at
St.-Aubin, and the earlier visit was an important one: since it supplied
him with the materials of his next work, of which Miss Annie Thackeray,
there also for a few days, suggested the title. The tragic drama which
forms the subject of Mr. Browning’s poem had been in great part enacted in
the vicinity of St.-Aubin; and the case of disputed inheritance to which
it had given rise was pending at that moment in the tribunals of Caen. The
prevailing impression left on Miss Thackeray’s mind by this primitive
district was, she declared, that of white cotton nightcaps (the habitual
headgear of the Normandy peasants). She engaged to write a story called
‘White Cotton Nightcap Country’; and Mr. Browning’s quick sense of both
contrast and analogy inspired the introduction of this emblem of repose
into his own picture of that peaceful, prosaic existence, and of the
ghastly spiritual conflict to which it had served as background. He
employed a good deal of perhaps strained ingenuity in the opening pages of
the work, in making the white cap foreshadow the red, itself the symbol of
liberty, and only indirectly connected with tragic events; and he would, I
think, have emphasized the irony of circumstance in a manner more
characteristic of himself, if he had laid his stress on the remoteness
from ‘the madding crowd’, and repeated Miss Thackeray’s title. There can,
however, be no doubt that his poetic imagination, no less than his human
insight, was amply vindicated by his treatment of the story.

On leaving St.-Aubin he spent a month at Fontainebleau, in a house
situated on the outskirts of the forest; and here his principal indoor
occupation was reading the Greek dramatists, especially Aeschylus, to whom
he had returned with revived interest and curiosity. ‘Red Cotton Nightcap
Country’ was not begun till his return to London in the later autumn. It
was published in the early summer of 1873.

Chapter 17

1873-1878

London Life—Love of Music—Miss Egerton-Smith—Periodical
Nervous Exhaustion—Mers; ‘Aristophanes’ Apology’—’Agamemnon’—’The
Inn Album’—’Pacchiarotto and other Poems’—Visits to Oxford and
Cambridge—Letters to Mrs. Fitz-Gerald—St. Andrews; Letter from
Professor Knight—In the Savoyard Mountains—Death of Miss
Egerton-Smith—’La Saisiaz’; ‘The Two Poets of Croisic’—Selections
from his Works.

The period on which we have now entered, covering roughly the ten or
twelve years which followed the publication of ‘The Ring and the Book’,
was the fullest in Mr. Browning’s life; it was that in which the varied
claims made by it on his moral, and above all his physical energies, found
in him the fullest power of response. He could rise early and go to bed
late—this, however, never from choice; and occupy every hour of the
day with work or pleasure, in a manner which his friends recalled
regretfully in later years, when of two or three engagements which ought
to have divided his afternoon, a single one—perhaps only the most
formally pressing—could be fulfilled. Soon after his final return to
England, while he still lived in comparative seclusion, certain habits of
friendly intercourse, often superficial, but always binding, had rooted
themselves in his life. London society, as I have also implied, opened
itself to him in ever-widening circles, or, as it would be truer to say,
drew him more and more deeply into its whirl; and even before the
mellowing kindness of his nature had infused warmth into the least
substantial of his social relations, the imaginative curiosity of the poet—for
a while the natural ambition of the man—found satisfaction in it.
For a short time, indeed, he entered into the fashionable routine of
country-house visiting. Besides the instances I have already given, and
many others which I may have forgotten, he was heard of, during the
earlier part of this decade, as the guest of Lord Carnarvon at Highclere
Castle, of Lord Shrewsbury at Alton Towers, of Lord Brownlow and his
mother, Lady Marian Alford, at Belton and Ashridge. Somewhat later, he
stayed with Mr. and Lady Alice Gaisford at a house they temporarily
occupied on the Sussex downs; with Mr. Cholmondeley at Condover, and, much
more recently, at Aynhoe Park with Mr. and Mrs. Cartwright. Kind and
pressing, and in themselves very tempting invitations of this nature came
to him until the end of his life; but he very soon made a practice of
declining them, because their acceptance could only renew for him the
fatigues of the London season, while the tantalizing beauty and repose of
the country lay before his eyes; but such visits, while they continued,
were one of the necessary social experiences which brought their grist to
his mill.

And now, in addition to the large social tribute which he received, and
had to pay, he was drinking in all the enjoyment, and incurring all the
fatigue which the London musical world could create for him. In Italy he
had found the natural home of the other arts. The one poem, ‘Old Pictures
in Florence’, is sufficiently eloquent of long communion with the old
masters and their works; and if his history in Florence and Rome had been
written in his own letters instead of those of his wife, they must have
held many reminiscences of galleries and studios, and of the places in
which pictures are bought and sold. But his love for music was as
certainly starved as the delight in painting and sculpture was nourished;
and it had now grown into a passion, from the indulgence of which he
derived, as he always declared, some of the most beneficent influences of
his life. It would be scarcely an exaggeration to say that he attended
every important concert of the season, whether isolated or given in a
course. There was no engagement possible or actual, which did not yield to
the discovery of its clashing with the day and hour fixed for one of
these. His frequent companion on such occasions was Miss Egerton-Smith.

Miss Smith became only known to Mr. Browning’s general acquaintance
through the dedicatory ‘A. E. S.’ of ‘La Saisiaz’; but she was, at the
time of her death, one of his oldest women friends. He first met her as a
young woman in Florence when she was visiting there; and the love for and
proficiency in music soon asserted itself as a bond of sympathy between
them. They did not, however, see much of each other till he had finally
left Italy, and she also had made her home in London. She there led a
secluded life, although free from family ties, and enjoying a large income
derived from the ownership of an important provincial paper. Mr. Browning
was one of the very few persons whose society she cared to cultivate; and
for many years the common musical interest took the practical, and for
both of them convenient form, of their going to concerts together. After
her death, in the autumn of 1877, he almost mechanically renounced all the
musical entertainments to which she had so regularly accompanied him. The
special motive and special facility were gone—she had been wont to
call for him in her carriage; the habit was broken; there would have been
first pain, and afterwards an unwelcome exertion in renewing it. Time was
also beginning to sap his strength, while society, and perhaps friendship,
were making increasing claims upon it. It may have been for this same
reason that music after a time seemed to pass out of his life altogether.
Yet its almost sudden eclipse was striking in the case of one who not only
had been so deeply susceptible to its emotional influences, so conversant
with its scientific construction and its multitudinous forms, but who was
acknowledged as ‘musical’ by those who best knew the subtle and complex
meaning of that often misused term.

Mr. Browning could do all that I have said during the period through which
we are now following him; but he could not quite do it with impunity. Each
winter brought its searching attack of cold and cough; each summer reduced
him to the state of nervous prostration or physical apathy of which I have
already spoken, and which at once rendered change imperative, and the
exertion of seeking it almost intolerable. His health and spirits
rebounded at the first draught of foreign air; the first breath from an
English cliff or moor might have had the same result. But the remembrance
of this fact never nerved him to the preliminary effort. The conviction
renewed itself with the close of every season, that the best thing which
could happen to him would be to be left quiet at home; and his
disinclination to face even the idea of moving equally hampered his sister
in her endeavour to make timely arrangements for their change of abode.

This special craving for rest helped to limit the area from which their
summer resort could be chosen. It precluded all idea of ‘pension’-life,
hence of any much-frequented spot in Switzerland or Germany. It was
tacitly understood that the shortening days were not to be passed in
England. Italy did not yet associate itself with the possibilities of a
moderately short absence; the resources of the northern French coast were
becoming exhausted; and as the August of 1874 approached, the question of
how and where this and the following months were to be spent was, perhaps,
more than ever a perplexing one. It was now Miss Smith who became the
means of its solution. She had more than once joined Mr. and Miss Browning
at the seaside. She was anxious this year to do so again, and she
suggested for their meeting a quiet spot called Mers, almost adjoining the
fashionable Treport, but distinct from it. It was agreed that they should
try it; and the experiment, which they had no reason to regret, opened
also in some degree a way out of future difficulties. Mers was young, and
had the defect of its quality. Only one desirable house was to be found
there; and the plan of joint residence became converted into one of joint
housekeeping, in which Mr. and Miss Browning at first refused to concur,
but which worked so well that it was renewed in the three ensuing summers:
Miss Smith retaining the initiative in the choice of place, her friends
the right of veto upon it. They stayed again together in 1875 at Villers,
on the coast of Normandy; in 1876 at the Isle of Arran; in 1877 at a house
called La Saisiaz—Savoyard for the sun—in the Saleve district
near Geneva.

The autumn months of 1874 were marked for Mr. Browning by an important
piece of work: the production of ‘Aristophanes’ Apology’. It was far
advanced when he returned to London in November, after a visit to Antwerp,
where his son was studying art under M. Heyermans; and its much later
appearance must have been intended to give breathing time to the readers
of ‘Red Cotton Nightcap Country’. Mr. Browning subsequently admitted that
he sometimes, during these years, allowed active literary occupation to
interfere too much with the good which his holiday might have done him;
but the temptations to literary activity were this time too great to be
withstood. The house occupied by him at Mers (Maison Robert) was the last
of the straggling village, and stood on a rising cliff. In front was the
open sea; beyond it a long stretch of down; everywhere comparative
solitude. Here, in uninterrupted quiet, and in a room devoted to his use,
Mr. Browning would work till the afternoon was advanced, and then set
forth on a long walk over the cliffs, often in the face of a wind which,
as he wrote of it at the time, he could lean against as if it were a wall.
And during this time he was living, not only in his work, but with the man
who had inspired it. The image of Aristophanes, in the half-shamed
insolence, the disordered majesty, in which he is placed before the
reader’s mind, was present to him from the first moment in which the
Defence was conceived. What was still more interesting, he could see him,
hear him, think with him, speak for him, and still inevitably condemn him.
No such instance of always ingenious, and sometimes earnest pleading
foredoomed to complete discomfiture, occurs in Mr. Browning’s works.

To Aristophanes he gave the dramatic sympathy which one lover of life can
extend to another, though that other unduly extol its lower forms. To
Euripides he brought the palm of the higher truth, to his work the tribute
of the more pathetic human emotion. Even these for a moment ministered to
the greatness of Aristophanes, in the tear shed by him to the memory of
his rival, in the hour of his own triumph; and we may be quite sure that
when Mr. Browning depicted that scene, and again when he translated the
great tragedian’s words, his own eyes were dimmed. Large tears fell from
them, and emotion choked his voice, when he first read aloud the
transcript of the ‘Herakles’ to a friend, who was often privileged to hear
him.

Mr. Browning’s deep feeling for the humanities of Greek literature, and
his almost passionate love for the language, contrasted strongly with his
refusal to regard even the first of Greek writers as models of literary
style. The pretensions raised for them on this ground were inconceivable
to him; and his translation of the ‘Agamemnon’, published 1877, was partly
made, I am convinced, for the pleasure of exposing these claims, and of
rebuking them. His preface to the transcript gives evidence of this. The
glee with which he pointed to it when it first appeared was no less
significant.

At Villers, in 1875, he only corrected the proofs of ‘The Inn Album’ for
publication in November. When the party started for the Isle of Arran, in
the autumn of 1876, the ‘Pacchiarotto’ volume had already appeared.

When Mr. Browning discontinued his short-lived habit of visiting away from
home, he made an exception in favour of the Universities. His occasional
visits to Oxford and Cambridge were maintained till the very end of his
life, with increasing frequency in the former case; and the days spent at
Balliol and Trinity afforded him as unmixed a pleasure as was compatible
with the interruption of his daily habits, and with a system of
hospitality which would detain him for many hours at table. A vivid
picture of them is given in two letters, dated January 20 and March 10,
1877, and addressed to one of his constant correspondents, Mrs.
Fitz-Gerald, of Shalstone Manor, Buckingham.

Dear Friend, I have your letter of yesterday, and thank you all I can for
its goodness and graciousness to me unworthy . . . I returned on Thursday—the
hospitality of our Master being not easy to set aside. But to begin with
the beginning: the passage from London to Oxford was exceptionally
prosperous—the train was full of men my friends. I was welcomed on
arriving by a Fellow who installed me in my rooms,—then came the
pleasant meeting with Jowett who at once took me to tea with his other
guests, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Bishop of London, Dean of
Westminster, the Airlies, Cardwells, male and female. Then came the
banquet—(I enclose you the plan having no doubt that you will
recognise the name of many an acquaintance: please return it)—and,
the dinner done, speechifying set in vigorously. The Archbishop proposed
the standing ‘Floreat domus de Balliolo’—to which the Master made
due and amusing answer, himself giving the health of the Primate. Lord
Coleridge, in a silvery speech, drank to the University, responded to by
the Vice-Chancellor. I forget who proposed the visitors—the Bishop
of London, perhaps Lord Cardwell. Professor Smith gave the two Houses of
Parliament,—Jowett, the Clergy, coupling with it the name of your
friend Mr. Rogers—on whom he showered every kind of praise, and Mr.
Rogers returned thanks very characteristically and pleasantly. Lord
Lansdowne drank to the Bar (Mr. Bowen), Lord Camperdown to—I really
forget what: Mr. Green to Literature and Science delivering a most
undeserved eulogium on myself, with a more rightly directed one on Arnold,
Swinburne, and the old pride of Balliol, Clough: this was cleverly and
almost touchingly answered by dear Mat Arnold. Then the Dean of
Westminster gave the Fellows and Scholars—and then—twelve
o’clock struck. We were, counting from the time of preliminary assemblage,
six hours and a half engaged: fully five and a half nailed to our
chairs at the table: but the whole thing was brilliant, genial, and
suggestive of many and various thoughts to me—and there was a
warmth, earnestness, and yet refinement about it which I never experienced
in any previous public dinner. Next morning I breakfasted with Jowett and
his guests, found that return would be difficult: while as the young men
were to return on Friday there would be no opposition to my departure on
Thursday. The morning was dismal with rain, but after luncheon there was a
chance of getting a little air, and I walked for more than two hours, then
heard service in New Coll.—then dinner again: my room had been
prepared in the Master’s house. So, on Thursday, after yet another
breakfast, I left by the noon-day train, after all sorts of kindly offices
from the Master. . . . No reporters were suffered to be present—the
account in yesterday’s Times was furnished by one or more of the guests;
it is quite correct as far as it goes. There were, I find, certain little
paragraphs which must have been furnished by ‘guessers’: Swinburne, set
down as present—was absent through his Father’s illness: the
Cardinal also excused himself as did the Bishop of Salisbury and others. .
. . Ever yours R. Browning.

The second letter, from Cambridge, was short and written in haste, at the
moment of Mr. Browning’s departure; but it tells the same tale of general
kindness and attention. Engagements for no less than six meals had
absorbed the first day of the visit. The occasion was that of Professor
Joachim’s investiture with his Doctor’s degree; and Mr. Browning declares
that this ceremony, the concert given by the great violinist, and his
society, were ‘each and all’ worth the trouble of the journey. He himself
was to receive the Cambridge degree of LL.D. in 1879, the Oxford D.C.L. in
1882. A passage in another letter addressed to the same friend, refers
probably to a practical reminiscence of ‘Red Cotton Nightcap Country’,
which enlivened the latter experience, and which Mrs. Fitz-Gerald had
witnessed with disapprobation.*

. . . You are far too hard on the very harmless drolleries of the young
men, licensed as they are moreover by immemorial usage. Indeed there used
to be a regularly appointed jester, ‘Filius Terrae’ he was called, whose
business it was to jibe and jeer at the honoured ones, by way of reminder
that all human glories are merely gilded bubbles and must not be fancied
metal. You saw that the Reverend Dons escaped no more than the poor Poet—or
rather I should say than myself the poor Poet—for I was pleased to
observe with what attention they listened to the Newdigate. . . . Ever
affectionately yours, R. Browning.

In 1875 he was unanimously nominated by its Independent Club, to the
office of Lord Rector of the University of Glasgow; and in 1877 he again
received the offer of the Rectorship of St. Andrews, couched in very
urgent and flattering terms. A letter addressed to him from this
University by Dr. William Knight, Professor of Moral Philosophy there,
which I have his permission to publish, bears witness to what had long
been and was always to remain a prominent fact of Mr. Browning’s literary
career: his great influence on the minds of the rising generation of his
countrymen.

The University, St. Andrews N.B.: Nov. 17, 1877.

My dear Sir,—. . . The students of this University, in which I have
the honour to hold office, have nominated you as their Lord Rector; and
intend unanimously, I am told, to elect you to that office on Thursday.

I believe that hitherto no Rector has been chosen by the undivided
suffrage of any Scottish University. They have heard however that you are
unable to accept the office: and your committee, who were deeply
disappointed to learn this afternoon of the way in which you have been
informed of their intentions, are, I believe, writing to you on the
subject. So keen is their regret that they intend respectfully to wait
upon you on Tuesday morning by deputation, and ask if you cannot waive
your difficulties in deference to their enthusiasm, and allow them to
proceed with your election.

Their suffrage may, I think, be regarded as one sign of how the thoughtful
youth of Scotland estimate the work you have done in the world of letters.

And permit me to say that while these Rectorial elections in the other
Universities have frequently turned on local questions, or been inspired
by political partisanship, St. Andrews has honourably sought to choose men
distinguished for literary eminence, and to make the Rectorship a tribute
at once of intellectual and moral esteem.

May I add that when the ‘perfervidum ingenium’ of our northern race takes
the form not of youthful hero-worship, but of loyal admiration and
respectful homage, it is a very genuine affair. In the present instance I
may say it is no mere outburst of young undisciplined enthusiasm, but an
honest expression of intellectual and moral indebtedness, the genuine and
distinct tribute of many minds that have been touched to some higher
issues by what you have taught them. They do not presume to speak of your
place in English literature. They merely tell you by this proffered honour
(the highest in their power to bestow), how they have felt your influence
over them.

My own obligations to you, and to the author of Aurora Leigh, are such,
that of them ‘silence is golden’. Yours ever gratefully. William Knight.

Mr. Browning was deeply touched and gratified by these professions of
esteem. He persisted nevertheless in his refusal. The Glasgow nomination
had also been declined by him.

On August 17, 1877, he wrote to Mrs. Fitz-Gerald from La Saisiaz:

‘How lovely is this place in its solitude and seclusion, with its trees
and shrubs and flowers, and above all its live mountain stream which
supplies three fountains, and two delightful baths, a marvel of delicate
delight framed in with trees—I bathe there twice a day—and
then what wonderful views from the chalet on every side! Geneva lying
under us, with the lake and the whole plain bounded by the Jura and our
own Saleve, which latter seems rather close behind our house, and yet
takes a hard hour and a half to ascend—all this you can imagine
since you know the environs of the town; the peace and quiet move me the
most—And I fancy I shall drowse out the two months or more, doing no
more of serious work than reading—and that is virtuous renunciation
of the glorious view to my right here—as I sit aerially like
Euripides, and see the clouds come and go and the view change in
correspondence with them. It will help me to get rid of the pain which
attaches itself to the recollections of Lucerne and Berne “in the old days
when the Greeks suffered so much,” as Homer says. But a very real and
sharp pain touched me here when I heard of the death of poor Virginia
March whom I knew particularly, and parted with hardly a fortnight ago,
leaving her affectionate and happy as ever. The tones of her voice as on
one memorable occasion she ejaculated repeatedly ‘Good friend!’ are fresh
still. Poor Virginia! . . .’

Mr. Browning was more than quiescent during this stay in the Savoyard
mountains. He was unusually depressed, and unusually disposed to regard
the absence from home as a banishment; and he tried subsequently to
account for this condition by the shadow which coming trouble sometimes
casts before it. It was more probably due to the want of the sea air which
he had enjoyed for so many years, and to that special oppressive heat of
the Swiss valleys which ascends with them to almost their highest level.
When he said that the Saleve seemed close behind the house, he was saying
in other words that the sun beat back from, and the air was intercepted by
it. We see, nevertheless, in his description of the surrounding scenery, a
promise of the contemplative delight in natural beauty to be henceforth so
conspicuous in his experience, and which seemed a new feature in it. He
had hitherto approached every living thing with curious and sympathetic
observation—this hardly requires saying of one who had animals for
his first and always familiar friends. Flowers also attracted him by their
perfume. But what he loved in nature was essentially its prefiguring of
human existence, or its echo of it; and it never appeared, in either his
works or his conversation, that he was much impressed by its inanimate
forms—by even those larger phenomena of mountain and cloud-land on
which the latter dwells. Such beauty as most appealed to him he had left
behind with the joys and sorrows of his Italian life, and it had almost
inevitably passed out of his consideration. During years of his residence
in London he never thought of the country as a source of pleasurable
emotions, other than those contingent on renewed health; and the places to
which he resorted had often not much beyond their health-giving qualities
to recommend them; his appetite for the beautiful had probably dwindled
for lack of food. But when a friend once said to him: ‘You have not a
great love for nature, have you?’ he had replied: ‘Yes, I have, but I love
men and women better;’ and the admission, which conveyed more than it
literally expressed, would have been true I believe at any, up to the
present, period of his history. Even now he did not cease to love men and
women best; but he found increasing enjoyment in the beauties of nature,
above all as they opened upon him on the southern slopes of the Alps; and
the delight of the aesthetic sense merged gradually in the satisfied
craving for pure air and brilliant sunshine which marked his final
struggle for physical life. A ring of enthusiasm comes into his letters
from the mountains, and deepens as the years advance; doubtless enhanced
by the great—perhaps too great—exhilaration which the Alpine
atmosphere produced, but also in large measure independent of it. Each new
place into which the summer carries him he declares more beautiful than
the last. It possibly was so.

A touch of autumnal freshness had barely crept into the atmosphere of the
Saleve, when a moral thunderbolt fell on the little group of persons
domiciled at its base: Miss Egerton-Smith died, in what had seemed for her
unusually good health, in the act of preparing for a mountain excursion
with her friends—the words still almost on her lips in which she had
given some directions for their comfort. Mr. Browning’s impressionable
nervous system was for a moment paralyzed by the shock. It revived in all
the emotional and intellectual impulses which gave birth to ‘La Saisiaz’.

This poem contains, besides its personal reference and association,
elements of distinctive biographical interest. It is the author’s first—as
also last—attempt to reconstruct his hope of immortality by a
rational process based entirely on the fundamental facts of his own
knowledge and consciousness—God and the human soul; and while the
very assumption of these facts, as basis for reasoning, places him at
issue with scientific thought, there is in his way of handling them a
tribute to the scientific spirit, perhaps foreshadowed in the beautiful
epilogue to ‘Dramatis Personae’, but of which there is no trace in his
earlier religious works. It is conclusive both in form and matter as to
his heterodox attitude towards Christianity. He was no less, in his way, a
Christian when he wrote ‘La Saisiaz’ than when he published ‘A Death in
the Desert’ and ‘Christmas Eve and Easter Day’; or at any period
subsequent to that in which he accepted without questioning what he had
learned at his mother’s knee. He has repeatedly written or declared in the
words of Charles Lamb:* ‘If Christ entered the room I should fall on my
knees;’ and again, in those of Napoleon: ‘I am an understander of men, and
he was no man.’ He has even added: ‘If he had been, he would have
been an impostor.’ But the arguments, in great part negative, set forth in
‘La Saisiaz’ for the immortality of the soul, leave no place for the idea,
however indefinite, of a Christian revelation on the subject. Christ
remained for Mr. Browning a mystery and a message of Divine Love, but no
messenger of Divine intention towards mankind.

The dialogue between Fancy and Reason is not only an admission of
uncertainty as to the future of the Soul: it is a plea for it; and as such
it gathers up into its few words of direct statement, threads of reasoning
which have been traceable throughout Mr. Browning’s work. In this plea for
uncertainty lies also a full and frank acknowledgment of the value of the
earthly life; and as interpreted by his general views, that value asserts
itself, not only in the means of probation which life affords, but in its
existing conditions of happiness. No one, he declares, possessing the
certainty of a future state would patiently and fully live out the
present; and since the future can be only the ripened fruit of the
present, its promise would be neutralized, as well as actual experience
dwarfed, by a definite revelation. Nor, conversely, need the want of a
certified future depress the present spiritual and moral life. It is in
the nature of the Soul that it would suffer from the promise. The
existence of God is a justification for hope. And since the certainty
would be injurious to the Soul, hence destructive to itself, the doubt—in
other words, the hope—becomes a sufficient approach to, a working
substitute for it. It is pathetic to see how in spite of the convictions
thus rooted in Mr. Browning’s mind, the expressed craving for more
knowledge, for more light, will now and then escape him.

Even orthodox Christianity gives no assurance of reunion to those whom
death has separated. It is obvious that Mr. Browning’s poetic creed could
hold no conviction regarding it. He hoped for such reunion in proportion
as he wished. There must have been moments in his life when the wish in
its passion overleapt the bounds of hope. ‘Prospice’ appears to prove
this. But the wide range of imagination, no less than the lack of
knowledge, forbade in him any forecast of the possibilities of the life to
come. He believed that if granted, it would be an advance on the present—an
accession of knowledge if not an increase of happiness. He was satisfied
that whatever it gave, and whatever it withheld, it would be good. In his
normal condition this sufficed to him.

‘La Saisiaz’ appeared in the early summer of 1878, and with it ‘The Two
Poets of Croisic’, which had been written immediately after it. The
various incidents of this poem are strictly historical; they lead the way
to a characteristic utterance of Mr. Browning’s philosophy of life to
which I shall recur later.

In 1872 Mr. Browning had published a first series of selections from his
works; it was to be followed by a second in 1880. In a preface to the
earlier volume, he indicates the plan which he has followed in the choice
and arrangement of poems; and some such intention runs also through the
second; since he declined a suggestion made to him for the introduction or
placing of a special poem, on the ground of its not conforming to the end
he had in view. It is difficult, in the one case as in the other, to
reconstruct the imagined personality to which his preface refers; and his
words on the later occasion pointed rather to that idea of a chord of
feeling which is raised by the correspondence of the first and last poems
of the respective groups. But either clue may be followed with interest.

Chapter 18

1878-1884

He revisits Italy; Asolo; Letters to Mrs. Fitz-Gerald—Venice—Favourite
Alpine Retreats—Mrs. Arthur Bronson—Life in Venice—A
Tragedy at Saint-Pierre—Mr. Cholmondeley—Mr. Browning’s
Patriotic Feeling; Extract from Letter to Mrs. Charles Skirrow—’Dramatic
Idyls’—’Jocoseria’—’Ferishtah’s Fancies’.

The catastrophe of La Saisiaz closed a comprehensive chapter in Mr.
Browning’s habits and experience. It impelled him finally to break with
the associations of the last seventeen autumns, which he remembered more
in their tedious or painful circumstances than in the unexciting pleasure
and renewed physical health which he had derived from them. He was weary
of the ever-recurring effort to uproot himself from his home life, only to
become stationary in some more or less uninteresting northern spot. The
always latent desire for Italy sprang up in him, and with it the often
present thought and wish to give his sister the opportunity of seeing it.

Florence and Rome were not included in his scheme; he knew them both too
well; but he hankered for Asolo and Venice. He determined, though as usual
reluctantly, and not till the last moment, that they should move
southwards in the August of 1878. Their route lay over the Spluegen; and
having heard of a comfortable hotel near the summit of the Pass, they
agreed to remain there till the heat had sufficiently abated to allow of
the descent into Lombardy. The advantages of this first arrangement
exceeded their expectations. It gave them solitude without the sense of
loneliness. A little stream of travellers passed constantly over the
mountain, and they could shake hands with acquaintances at night, and know
them gone in the morning. They dined at the table d’hote, but took all
other meals alone, and slept in a detached wing or ‘dependance’ of the
hotel. Their daily walks sometimes carried them down to the Via Mala;
often to the top of the ascent, where they could rest, looking down into
Italy; and would even be prolonged over a period of five hours and an
extent of seventeen miles. Now, as always, the mountain air stimulated Mr.
Browning’s physical energy; and on this occasion it also especially
quickened his imaginative powers. He was preparing the first series of
‘Dramatic Idylls’; and several of these, including ‘Ivan Ivanovitch’, were
produced with such rapidity that Miss Browning refused to countenance a
prolonged stay on the mountain, unless he worked at a more reasonable
rate.

They did not linger on their way to Asolo and Venice, except for a night’s
rest on the Lake of Como and two days at Verona. In their successive
journeys through Northern Italy they visited by degrees all its notable
cities, and it would be easy to recall, in order and detail, most of these
yearly expeditions. But the account of them would chiefly resolve itself
into a list of names and dates; for Mr. Browning had seldom a new
impression to receive, even from localities which he had not seen before.
I know that he and his sister were deeply struck by the deserted grandeurs
of Ravenna; and that it stirred in both of them a memorable sensation to
wander as they did for a whole day through the pinewoods consecrated by
Dante. I am nevertheless not sure that when they performed the repeated
round of picture-galleries and palaces, they were not sometimes simply
paying their debt to opportunity, and as much for each other’s sake as for
their own. Where all was Italy, there was little to gain or lose in one
memorial of greatness, one object of beauty, visited or left unseen. But
in Asolo, even in Venice, Mr. Browning was seeking something more: the
remembrance of his own actual and poetic youth. How far he found it in the
former place we may infer from a letter to Mrs. Fitz-Gerald.

Sept. 28, 1878.

And from ‘Asolo’, at last, dear friend! So can dreams come false.—S.,
who has been writing at the opposite side of the table, has told you about
our journey and adventures, such as they were: but she cannot tell you the
feelings with which I revisit this—to me—memorable place after
above forty years’ absence,—such things have begun and ended with me
in the interval! It was too strange when we reached the ruined
tower on the hill-top yesterday, and I said ‘Let me try if the echo still
exists which I discovered here,’ (you can produce it from only one
particular spot on a remainder of brickwork—) and thereupon it
answered me plainly as ever, after all the silence: for some children from
the adjoining ‘podere’, happening to be outside, heard my voice and its
result—and began trying to perform the feat—calling ‘Yes, yes’—all
in vain: so, perhaps, the mighty secret will die with me! We shall
probably stay here a day or two longer,—the air is so pure, the
country so attractive: but we must go soon to Venice, stay our allotted
time there, and then go homeward: you will of course address letters to
Venice, not this place: it is a pleasure I promise myself that, on
arriving I shall certainly hear you speak in a letter which I count upon
finding.

The old inn here, to which I would fain have betaken myself, is gone—levelled
to the ground: I remember it was much damaged by a recent earthquake, and
the cracks and chasms may have threatened a downfall. This Stella d’Oro
is, however, much such an unperverted ‘locanda’ as its predecessor—primitive
indeed are the arrangements and unsophisticate the ways: but there is
cleanliness, abundance of goodwill, and the sweet Italian smile at every
mistake: we get on excellently. To be sure never was such a perfect
fellow-traveller, for my purposes, as S., so that I have no subject of
concern—if things suit me they suit her—and vice-versa. I
daresay she will have told you how we trudged together, this morning to
Possagno—through a lovely country: how we saw all the wonders—and
a wonder of detestability is the paint-performance of the great man!—and
how, on our return, we found the little town enjoying high market day, and
its privilege of roaring and screaming over a bargain. It confuses me
altogether,—but at Venice I may write more comfortably. You will
till then, Dear Friend, remember me ever as yours affectionately, Robert
Browning.

If the tone of this does not express disappointment, it has none of the
rapture which his last visit was to inspire. The charm which forty years
of remembrance had cast around the little city on the hill was dispelled
for, at all events, the time being. The hot weather and dust-covered
landscape, with the more than primitive accommodation of which he spoke in
a letter to another friend, may have contributed something to this result.

At Venice the travellers fared better in some essential respects. A London
acquaintance, who passed them on their way to Italy, had recommended a
cool and quiet hotel there, the Albergo dell’ Universo. The house, Palazzo
Brandolin-Rota, was situated on the shady side of the Grand Canal, just
below the Accademia and the Suspension Bridge. The open stretches of the
Giudecca lay not far behind; and a scrap of garden and a clean and open
little street made pleasant the approach from back and side. It
accommodated few persons in proportion to its size, and fewer still took
up their abode there; for it was managed by a lady of good birth and
fallen fortunes whose home and patrimony it had been; and her husband, a
retired Austrian officer, and two grown-up daughters did not lighten her
task. Every year the fortunes sank lower; the upper storey of the house
was already falling into decay, and the fine old furniture passing into
the brokers’ or private buyers’ hands. It still, however, afforded
sufficiently comfortable, and, by reason of its very drawbacks, desirable
quarters to Mr. Browning. It perhaps turned the scale in favour of his
return to Venice; for the lady whose hospitality he was to enjoy there was
as yet unknown to him; and nothing would have induced him to enter, with
his eyes open, one of the English-haunted hotels, in which acquaintance,
old and new, would daily greet him in the public rooms or jostle him in
the corridors.

He and his sister remained at the Universo for a fortnight; their
programme did not this year include a longer stay; but it gave them time
to decide that no place could better suit them for an autumn holiday than
Venice, or better lend itself to a preparatory sojourn among the Alps; and
the plan of their next, and, though they did not know it, many a following
summer, was thus sketched out before the homeward journey had begun.

Mr. Browning did not forget his work, even while resting from it; if
indeed he did rest entirely on this occasion. He consulted a Russian lady
whom he met at the hotel, on the names he was introducing in ‘Ivan
Ivanovitch’. It would be interesting to know what suggestions or
corrections she made, and how far they adapted themselves to the rhythm
already established, or compelled changes in it; but the one alternative
would as little have troubled him as the other. Mrs. Browning told Mr.
Prinsep that her husband could never alter the wording of a poem without
rewriting it, indeed, practically converting it into another; though he
more than once tried to do so at her instigation. But to the end of his
life he could at any moment recast a line or passage for the sake of
greater correctness, and leave all that was essential in it untouched.

Seven times more in the eleven years which remained to him, Mr. Browning
spent the autumn in Venice. Once also, in 1882, he had proceeded towards
it as far as Verona, when the floods which marked the autumn of that year
arrested his farther course. Each time he had halted first in some more or
less elevated spot, generally suggested by his French friend, Monsieur
Dourlans, himself an inveterate wanderer, whose inclinations also tempted
him off the beaten track. The places he most enjoyed were Saint-Pierre la
Chartreuse, and Gressoney Saint-Jean, where he stayed respectively in 1881
and 1882, 1883 and 1885. Both of these had the drawbacks, and what might
easily have been the dangers, of remoteness from the civilized world. But
this weighed with him so little, that he remained there in each case till
the weather had broken, though there was no sheltered conveyance in which
he and his sister could travel down; and on the later occasions at least,
circumstances might easily have combined to prevent their departure for an
indefinite time. He became, indeed, so attached to Gressoney, with its
beautiful outlook upon Monte Rosa, that nothing I believe would have
hindered his returning, or at least contemplating a return to it, but the
great fatigue to his sister of the mule ride up the mountain, by a path
which made walking, wherever possible, the easier course. They did walk down
it in the early October of 1885, and completed the hard seven hours’
trudge to San Martino d’Aosta, without an atom of refreshment or a
minute’s rest.

One of the great attractions of Saint-Pierre was the vicinity of the
Grande Chartreuse, to which Mr. Browning made frequent expeditions,
staying there through the night in order to hear the midnight mass. Miss
Browning also once attempted the visit, but was not allowed to enter the
monastery. She slept in the adjoining convent.

The brother and sister were again at the Universo in 1879, 1880, and 1881;
but the crash was rapidly approaching, and soon afterwards it came. The
old Palazzo passed into other hands, and after a short period of private
ownership was consigned to the purposes of an Art Gallery.

In 1880, however, they had been introduced by Mrs. Story to an American
resident, Mrs. Arthur Bronson, and entered into most friendly relations
with her; and when, after a year’s interval, they were again contemplating
an autumn in Venice, she placed at their disposal a suite of rooms in the
Palazzo Giustiniani Recanati, which formed a supplement to her own house—making
the offer with a kindly urgency which forbade all thought of declining it.
They inhabited these for a second time in 1885, keeping house for
themselves in the simple but comfortable foreign manner they both so well
enjoyed, only dining and spending the evening with their friend. But when,
in 1888, they were going, as they thought, to repeat the arrangement, they
found, to their surprise, a little apartment prepared for them under Mrs.
Bronson’s own roof. This act of hospitality involved a special kindness on
her part, of which Mr. Browning only became aware at the close of a
prolonged stay; and a sense of increased gratitude added itself to the
affectionate regard with which his hostess had already inspired both his
sister and him. So far as he is concerned, the fact need only be
indicated. It is fully expressed in the preface to ‘Asolando’.

During the first and fresher period of Mr. Browning’s visits to Venice, he
found a passing attraction in its society. It held an historical element
which harmonized well with the decayed magnificence of the city, its
old-world repose, and the comparatively simple modes of intercourse still
prevailing there. Mrs. Bronson’s ‘salon’ was hospitably open whenever her
health allowed; but her natural refinement, and the conservatism which so
strongly marks the higher class of Americans, preserved it from the
heterogeneous character which Anglo-foreign sociability so often assumes.
Very interesting, even important names lent their prestige to her circle;
and those of Don Carlos and his family, of Prince and Princess Iturbide,
of Prince and Princess Metternich, and of Princess Montenegro, were on the
list of her ‘habitues’, and, in the case of the royal Spaniards, of her
friends. It need hardly be said that the great English poet, with his fast
spreading reputation and his infinite social charm, was kindly welcomed
and warmly appreciated amongst them.

English and American acquaintances also congregated in Venice, or passed
through it from London, Florence, and Rome. Those resident in Italy could
make their visits coincide with those of Mr. Browning and his sister, or
undertake the journey for the sake of seeing them; while the outward
conditions of life were such as to render friendly intercourse more
satisfactory, and common social civilities less irksome than they could be
at home. Mr. Browning was, however, already too advanced in years, too
familiar with everything which the world can give, to be long affected by
the novelty of these experiences. It was inevitable that the need of rest,
though often for the moment forgotten, should assert itself more and more.
He gradually declined on the society of a small number of resident or
semi-resident friends; and, due exception being made for the hospitalities
of his temporary home, became indebted to the kindness of Sir Henry and
Lady Layard, of Mr. and Mrs. Curtis of Palazzo Barbaro, and of Mr. and
Mrs. Frederic Eden, for most of the social pleasure and comfort of his
later residences in Venice.

Part of a letter to Mrs. Fitz-Gerald gives an insight into the character
of his life there: all the stronger that it was written under a temporary
depression which it partly serves to explain.

Albergo dell’ Universo, Venezia, Italia: Sept. 24, ’81.

‘Dear Friend,—On arriving here I found your letter to my great
satisfaction—and yesterday brought the ‘Saturday Review’—for
which, many thanks.

‘We left our strange but lovely place on the 18th, reaching Chambery at
evening,—stayed the next day there,—walking, among other
diversions to “Les Charmettes”, the famous abode of Rousseau—kept
much as when he left it: I visited it with my wife perhaps twenty-five
years ago, and played so much of “Rousseau’s Dream” as could be effected
on his antique harpsichord: this time I attempted the same feat, but only
two notes or thereabouts out of the octave would answer the touch. Next
morning we proceeded to Turin, and on Wednesday got here, in the middle of
the last night of the Congress Carnival—rowing up the Canal to our
Albergo through a dazzling blaze of lights and throng of boats,—there
being, if we are told truly, 50,000 strangers in the city. Rooms had been
secured for us, however: and the festivities are at an end, to my great
joy,—for Venice is resuming its old quiet aspect—the only one
I value at all. Our American friends wanted to take us in their gondola to
see the principal illuminations after the “Serenade”, which was not
over before midnight—but I was contented with that—being
tired and indisposed for talking, and, having seen and heard quite enough
from our own balcony, went to bed: S. having betaken her to her own room
long before.

‘Next day we took stock of our acquaintances,—found that the Storys,
on whom we had counted for company, were at Vallombrosa, though the two
sons have a studio here—other friends are in sufficient number
however—and last evening we began our visits by a very classical one—to
the Countess Mocenigo, in her palace which Byron occupied: she is a
charming widow since two years,—young, pretty and of the prettiest
manners: she showed us all the rooms Byron had lived in,—and I wrote
my name in her album on the desk himself wrote the last canto of
‘Ch. Harold’ and ‘Beppo’ upon. There was a small party: we were taken and
introduced by the Layards who are kind as ever, and I met old friends—Lord
Aberdare, Charles Bowen, and others. While I write comes a deliciously
fresh ‘bouquet’ from Mrs. Bronson, an American lady,—in short we
shall find a week or two amusing enough; though—where are the
pinewoods, mountains and torrents, and wonderful air? Venice is under a
cloud,—dull and threatening,—though we were apprehensive of
heat, arriving, as we did, ten days earlier than last year. . . .’

The evening’s programme was occasionally varied by a visit to one of the
theatres. The plays given were chiefly in the Venetian dialect, and needed
previous study for their enjoyment; but Mr. Browning assisted at one
musical performance which strongly appealed to his historical and artistic
sensibilities: that of the ‘Barbiere’ of Paisiello in the Rossini theatre
and in the presence of Wagner, which took place in the autumn of 1880.

Although the manner of his sojourn in the Italian city placed all the
resources of resident life at his command, Mr. Browning never abjured the
active habits of the English traveller. He daily walked with his sister,
as he did in the mountains, for walking’s sake, as well as for the delight
of what his expeditions showed him; and the facilities which they supplied
for this healthful pleasurable exercise were to his mind one of the great
merits of his autumn residences in Italy. He explored Venice in all
directions, and learned to know its many points of beauty and interest, as
those cannot who believe it is only to be seen from a gondola; and when he
had visited its every corner, he fell back on a favourite stroll along the
Riva to the public garden and back again; never failing to leave the house
at about the same hour of the day. Later still, when a friend’s gondola
was always at hand, and air and sunshine were the one thing needful, he
would be carried to the Lido, and take a long stretch on its farther
shore.

The letter to Mrs. Fitz-Gerald, from which I have already quoted,
concludes with the account of a tragic occurrence which took place at
Saint-Pierre just before his departure, and in which Mr. Browning’s
intuitions had played a striking part.

‘And what do you think befell us in this abode of peace and innocence? Our
journey was delayed for three hours in consequence of the one mule of the
village being requisitioned by the ‘Juge d’Instruction’ from Grenoble,
come to enquire into a murder committed two days before. My sister and I
used once a day to walk for a couple of hours up a mountain-road of the
most lovely description, and stop at the summit whence we looked down upon
the minute hamlet of St.-Pierre d’Entremont,—even more secluded than
our own: then we got back to our own aforesaid. And in this Paradisial
place, they found, yesterday week, a murdered man—frightfully
mutilated—who had been caught apparently in the act of stealing
potatoes in a field: such a crime had never occurred in the memory of the
oldest of our folk. Who was the murderer is the mystery—whether the
field’s owner—in his irritation at discovering the robber,—or
one of a band of similar ‘charbonniers’ (for they suppose the man to be a
Piedmontese of that occupation) remains to be proved: they began by
imprisoning the owner, who denies his guilt energetically. Now the odd
thing is, that, either the day of, or after the murder,—as I and S.
were looking at the utter solitude, I had the fancy “What should I do if I
suddenly came upon a dead body in this field? Go and proclaim it—and
subject myself to all the vexations inflicted by the French way of
procedure (which begins by assuming that you may be the criminal)—or
neglect an obvious duty, and return silently.” I, of course, saw that the
former was the only proper course, whatever the annoyance involved. And,
all the while, there was just about to be the very same incident for the
trouble of somebody.’

Here the account breaks off; but writing again from the same place, August
16, 1882, he takes up the suspended narrative with this question:

‘Did I tell you of what happened to me on the last day of my stay here
last year?’ And after repeating the main facts continues as follows:

‘This morning, in the course of my walk, I entered into conversation with
two persons of whom I made enquiry myself. They said the accused man, a
simple person, had been locked up in a high chamber,—protesting his
innocence strongly,—and troubled in his mind by the affair
altogether and the turn it was taking, had profited by the gendarme’s
negligence, and thrown himself out of the window—and so died,
continuing to the last to protest as before. My presentiment of what such
a person might have to undergo was justified you see—though I should
not in any case have taken that way of getting out of the
difficulty. The man added, “it was not he who committed the murder, but
the companions of the man, an Italian charcoal-burner, who owed him a
grudge, killed him, and dragged him to the field—filling his sack
with potatoes as if stolen, to give a likelihood that the field’s owner
had caught him stealing and killed him,—so M. Perrier the greffier
told me.” Enough of this grim story.

. . . . .

‘My sister was anxious to know exactly where the body was found: “Vouz
savez la croix au sommet de la colline? A cette distance de cela!” That is
precisely where I was standing when the thought came over me.’

A passage in a subsequent letter of September 3 clearly refers to some
comment of Mrs. Fitz-Gerald’s on the peculiar nature of this presentiment:

‘No—I attribute no sort of supernaturalism to my fancy about the
thing that was really about to take place. By a law of the association of
ideas—contraries come into the mind as often as similarities—and
the peace and solitude readily called up the notion of what would most jar
with them. I have often thought of the trouble that might have befallen me
if poor Miss Smith’s death had happened the night before, when we were on
the mountain alone together—or next morning when we were on the
proposed excursion—only then we should have had companions.’

The letter then passes to other subjects.

‘This is the fifth magnificent day—like magnificence, unfit for
turning to much account—for we cannot walk till sunset. I had two
hours’ walk, or nearly, before breakfast, however: It is the loveliest
country I ever had experience of, and we shall prolong our stay perhaps—apart
from the concern for poor Cholmondeley and his friends, I should be glad
to apprehend no long journey—besides the annoyance of having to pass
Florence and Rome unvisited, for S.’s sake, I mean: even Naples would have
been with its wonderful environs a tantalizing impracticability.

‘Your “Academy” came and was welcomed. The newspaper is like an electric
eel, as one touches it and expects a shock. I am very anxious about the
Archbishop who has always been strangely kind to me.’

He and his sister had accepted an invitation to spend the month of October
with Mr. Cholmondeley at his villa in Ischia; but the party assembled
there was broken up by the death of one of Mr. Cholmondeley’s guests, a
young lady who had imprudently attempted the ascent of a dangerous
mountain without a guide, and who lost her life in the experiment.

A short extract from a letter to Mrs. Charles Skirrow will show that even
in this complete seclusion Mr. Browning’s patriotism did not go to sleep.
There had been already sufficient evidence that his friendship did not;
but it was not in the nature of his mental activities that they should be
largely absorbed by politics, though he followed the course of his
country’s history as a necessary part of his own life. It needed a crisis
like that of our Egyptian campaign, or the subsequent Irish struggle, to
arouse him to a full emotional participation in current events. How deeply
he could be thus aroused remained yet to be seen.

‘If the George Smiths are still with you, give them my love, and tell them
we shall expect to see them at Venice,—which was not so likely to be
the case when we were bound for Ischia. As for Lady Wolseley—one
dares not pretend to vie with her in anxiety just now; but my own pulses
beat pretty strongly when I open the day’s newspaper—which, by some
new arrangement, reaches us, oftener than not, on the day after
publication. Where is your Bertie? I had an impassioned letter, a
fortnight ago, from a nephew of mine, who is in the second division
[battalion?] of the Black Watch; he was ordered to Edinburgh, and the
regiment not dispatched, after all,—it having just returned from
India; the poor fellow wrote in his despair “to know if I could do
anything!” He may be wanted yet: though nothing seems wanted in Egypt, so
capital appears to be the management.’

In 1879 Mr. Browning published the first series of his ‘Dramatic Idyls’;
and their appearance sent a thrill of surprised admiration through the
public mind. In ‘La Saisiaz’ and the accompanying poems he had
accomplished what was virtually a life’s work. For he was approaching the
appointed limit of man’s existence; and the poetic, which had been
nourished in him by the natural life—which had once outstripped its
developments, but on the whole remained subject to them—had
therefore, also, passed through the successive phases of individual
growth. He had been inspired as dramatic poet by the one avowed conviction
that little else is worth study but the history of a soul; and outward act
or circumstance had only entered into his creations as condition or
incident of the given psychological state. His dramatic imagination had
first, however unconsciously, sought its materials in himself; then
gradually been projected into the world of men and women, which his
widening knowledge laid open to him; it is scarcely necessary to say that
its power was only fully revealed when it left the remote regions of
poetical and metaphysical self-consciousness, to invoke the not less
mysterious and far more searching utterance of the general human heart. It
was a matter of course that in this expression of his dramatic genius, the
intellectual and emotional should exhibit the varying relations which are
developed by the natural life: that feeling should begin by doing the work
of thought, as in ‘Saul’, and thought end by doing the work of feeling, as
in ‘Fifine at the Fair’; and that the two should alternate or combine in
proportioned intensity in such works of an intermediate period as ‘Cleon’,
‘A Death in the Desert’, the ‘Epistle of Karshish’, and ‘James Lee’s
Wife’; the sophistical ingenuities of ‘Bishop Blougram’, and ‘Sludge’; and
the sad, appealing tenderness of ‘Andrea del Sarto’ and ‘The Worst of It’.

It was also almost inevitable that so vigorous a genius should sometimes
falsify calculations based on the normal life. The long-continued force
and freshness of Mr. Browning’s general faculties was in itself a protest
against them. We saw without surprise that during the decade which
produced ‘Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau’, ‘Fifine at the Fair’, and ‘Red
Cotton Nightcap Country’, he could give us ‘The Inn Album’, with its
expression of the higher sexual love unsurpassed, rarely equalled, in the
whole range of his work: or those two unique creations of airy fancy and
passionate symbolic romance, ‘Saint Martin’s Summer’, and ‘Numpholeptos’.
It was no ground for astonishment that the creative power in him should
even ignore the usual period of decline, and defy, so far as is humanly
possible, its natural laws of modification. But in the ‘Dramatic Idyls’ he
did more than proceed with unflagging powers on a long-trodden,
distinctive course; he took a new departure.

Mr. Browning did not forsake the drama of motive when he imagined and
worked out his new group of poems; he presented it in a no less subtle and
complex form. But he gave it the added force of picturesque realization;
and this by means of incidents both powerful in themselves, and especially
suited for its development. It was only in proportion to this higher
suggestiveness that a startling situation ever seemed to him fit subject
for poetry. Where its interest and excitement exhausted themselves in the
external facts, it became, he thought, the property of the chronicler, but
supplied no material for the poet; and he often declined matter which had
been offered him for dramatic treatment because it belonged to the more
sensational category.

It is part of the vital quality of the ‘Dramatic Idyls’ that, in them, the
act and the motive are not yet finally identified with each other. We see
the act still palpitating with the motive; the motive dimly striving to
recognize or disclaim itself in the act. It is in this that the
psychological poet stands more than ever strongly revealed. Such at least
is the case in ‘Martin Relph’, and the idealized Russian legend, ‘Ivan
Ivanovitch’. The grotesque tragedy of ‘Ned Bratts’ has also its marked
psychological aspects, but they are of a simpler and broader kind.

The new inspiration slowly subsided through the second series of ‘Idyls’,
1880, and ‘Jocoseria’, 1883. In ‘Ferishtah’s Fancies’, 1884, Mr. Browning
returned to his original manner, though carrying into it something of the
renewed vigour which had marked the intervening change. The lyrics which
alternate with its parables include some of the most tender, most
impassioned, and most musical of his love-poems.

The moral and religious opinions conveyed in this later volume may be
accepted without reserve as Mr. Browning’s own, if we subtract from them
the exaggerations of the figurative and dramatic form. It is indeed easy
to recognize in them the under currents of his whole real and imaginative
life. They have also on one or two points an intrinsic value which will
justify a later allusion.

Chapter 19

1881-1887

The Browning Society; Mr. Furnivall; Miss E. H. Hickey—His Attitude
towards the Society; Letter to Mrs. Fitz-Gerald—Mr. Thaxter, Mrs.
Celia Thaxter—Letter to Miss Hickey; ‘Strafford’—Shakspere and
Wordsworth Societies—Letters to Professor Knight—Appreciation
in Italy; Professor Nencioni—The Goldoni Sonnet—Mr. Barrett
Browning; Palazzo Manzoni—Letters to Mrs. Charles Skirrow—Mrs.
Bloomfield Moore—Llangollen; Sir Theodore and Lady Martin—Loss
of old Friends—Foreign Correspondent of the Royal Academy—’Parleyings
with certain People of Importance in their Day’.

This Indian summer of Mr. Browning’s genius coincided with the highest
manifestation of public interest, which he, or with one exception, any
living writer, had probably yet received: the establishment of a Society
bearing his name, and devoted to the study of his poetry. The idea arose
almost simultaneously in the mind of Dr., then Mr. Furnivall, and of Miss
E. H. Hickey. One day, in the July of 1881, as they were on their way to
Warwick Crescent to pay an appointed visit there, Miss Hickey strongly
expressed her opinion of the power and breadth of Mr. Browning’s work; and
concluded by saying that much as she loved Shakespeare, she found in
certain aspects of Browning what even Shakespeare could not give her. Mr.
Furnivall replied to this by asking what she would say to helping him to
found a Browning Society; and it then appeared that Miss Hickey had
recently written to him a letter, suggesting that he should found one; but
that it had miscarried, or, as she was disposed to think, not been posted.
Being thus, at all events, agreed as to the fitness of the undertaking,
they immediately spoke of it to Mr. Browning, who at first treated the
project as a joke; but did not oppose it when once he understood it to be
serious. His only proviso was that he should remain neutral in respect to
its fulfilment. He refused even to give Mr. Furnivall the name or address
of any friends, whose interest in himself or his work might render their
co-operation probable.

This passive assent sufficed. A printed prospectus was now issued. About
two hundred members were soon secured. A committee was elected, of which
Mr. J. T. Nettleship, already well known as a Browning student, was one of
the most conspicuous members; and by the end of October a small Society
had come into existence, which held its inaugural meeting in the Botanic
Theatre of University College. Mr. Furnivall, its principal founder, and
responsible organizer, was Chairman of the Committee, and Miss E. H.
Hickey, the co-founder, was Honorary Secretary. When, two or three years
afterwards, illness compelled her to resign this position, it was assumed
by Mr. J. Dykes Campbell.

Although nothing could be more unpretending than the action of this
Browning Society, or in the main more genuine than its motive, it did not
begin life without encountering ridicule and mistrust. The formation of a
Ruskin Society in the previous year had already established a precedent
for allowing a still living worker to enjoy the fruits of his work, or, as
some one termed it, for making a man a classic during his lifetime. But
this fact was not yet generally known; and meanwhile a curious
contradiction developed itself in the public mind. The outer world of Mr.
Browning’s acquaintance continued to condemn the too great honour which
was being done to him; from those of the inner circle he constantly
received condolences on being made the subject of proceedings which,
according to them, he must somehow regard as an offence.

This was the last view of the case which he was prepared to take. At the
beginning, as at the end, he felt honoured by the intentions of the
Society. He probably, it is true, had occasional misgivings as to its
future. He could not be sure that its action would always be judicious,
still less that it would be always successful. He was prepared for its
being laughed at, and for himself being included in the laughter. He
consented to its establishment for what seemed to him the one unanswerable
reason, that he had, even on the ground of taste, no just cause for
forbidding it. No line, he considered, could be drawn between the kind of
publicity which every writer seeks, which, for good or evil, he had
already obtained, and that which the Browning Society was conferring on
him. His works would still, as before, be read, analyzed, and discussed
‘viva voce’ and in print. That these proceedings would now take place in
other localities than drawing-rooms or clubs, through other organs than
newspapers or magazines, by other and larger groups of persons than those
usually gathered round a dinner-or a tea-table, involved no real change in
the situation. In any case, he had made himself public property; and those
who thus organized their study of him were exercising an individual right.
If his own rights had been assailed he would have guarded them also; but
the circumstances of the case precluded such a contingency. And he had his
reward. How he felt towards the Society at the close of its first session
is better indicated in the following letter to Mrs. Fitz-Gerald than in
the note to Mr. Yates which Mr. Sharp has published, and which was written
with more reserve and, I believe, at a rather earlier date. Even the shade
of condescension which lingers about his words will have been effaced by
subsequent experience; and many letters written to Dr. Furnivall must,
since then, have attested his grateful and affectionate appreciation of
kindness intended and service done to him.

. . . They always treat me gently in ‘Punch’—why don’t you do the
same by the Browning Society? I see you emphasize Miss Hickey’s
acknowledgement of defects in time and want of rehearsal: but I look for
no great perfection in a number of kindly disposed strangers to me
personally, who try to interest people in my poems by singing and reading
them. They give their time for nothing, offer their little entertainment
for nothing, and certainly get next to nothing in the way of thanks—unless
from myself who feel grateful to the faces I shall never see, the voices I
shall never hear. The kindest notices I have had, or at all events those
that have given me most pleasure, have been educed by this Society—A.
Sidgwick’s paper, that of Professor Corson, Miss Lewis’ article in this
month’s ‘Macmillan’—and I feel grateful for it all, for my part,—and
none the less for a little amusement at the wonder of some of my friends
that I do not jump up and denounce the practices which must annoy me so
much. Oh! my ‘gentle Shakespeare’, how well you felt and said—’never
anything can be amiss when simpleness and duty tender it.’ So, dear Lady,
here is my duty and simplicity tendering itself to you, with all affection
besides, and I being ever yours, R. Browning.

That general disposition of the London world which left the ranks of the
little Society to be three-fourths recruited among persons, many living at
a distance, whom the poet did not know, became also in its way a
satisfaction. It was with him a matter of course, though never of
indifference, that his closer friends of both sexes were among its
members; it was one of real gratification that they included from the
beginning such men as Dean Boyle of Salisbury, the Rev. Llewellyn Davies,
George Meredith, and James Cotter Morison—that they enjoyed the
sympathy and co-operation of such a one as Archdeacon Farrar. But he had
an ingenuous pride in reading the large remainder of the Society’s lists
of names, and pointing out the fact that there was not one among them
which he had ever heard. It was equivalent to saying, ‘All these people
care for me as a poet. No social interest, no personal prepossession, has
attracted them to my work.’ And when the unknown name was not only
appended to a list; when it formed the signature of a paper—excellent
or indifferent as might be—but in either case bearing witness to a
careful and unobtrusive study of his poems, by so much was the
gratification increased. He seldom weighed the intrinsic merit of such
productions; he did not read them critically. No man was ever more adverse
to the seeming ungraciousness of analyzing the quality of a gift. In real
life indeed this power of gratitude sometimes defeated its own end, by
neutralizing his insight into the motive or effort involved in different
acts of kindness, and placing them all successively on the same plane.

In the present case, however, an ungraduated acceptance of the labour
bestowed on him was part of the neutral attitude which it was his constant
endeavour to maintain. He always refrained from noticing any erroneous
statement concerning himself or his works which might appear in the Papers
of the Society: since, as he alleged, if he once began to correct, he
would appear to endorse whatever he left uncorrected, and thus make
himself responsible, not only for any interpretation that might be placed
on his poems, but, what was far more serious, for every eulogium that was
bestowed upon them. He could not stand aloof as entirely as he or even his
friends desired, since it was usual with some members of the Society to
seek from him elucidations of obscure passages which, without these, it
was declared, would be a stumbling-block to future readers. But he
disliked being even to this extent drawn into its operation; and his help
was, I believe, less and less frequently invoked. Nothing could be more
false than the rumour which once arose that he superintended those
performances of his plays which took place under the direction of the
Society. Once only, and by the urgent desire of some of the actors, did he
witness a last rehearsal of one of them.

It was also a matter of course that men and women brought together by a
pre-existing interest in Mr. Browning’s work should often ignore its
authorized explanations, and should read and discuss it in the light of
personal impressions more congenial to their own mind; and the various and
circumstantial views sometimes elicited by a given poem did not serve to
render it more intelligible. But the merit of true poetry lies so largely
in its suggestiveness, that even mistaken impressions of it have their
positive value and also their relative truth; and the intellectual
friction which was thus created, not only in the parent society, but in
its offshoots in England and America, was not their least important
result.

These Societies conferred, it need hardly be said, no less real benefits
on the public at large. They extended the sale of Mr. Browning’s works,
and with it their distinct influence for intellectual and moral good. They
not only created in many minds an interest in these works, but aroused the
interest where it was latent, and gave it expression where it had hitherto
found no voice. One fault, alone, could be charged against them; and this
lay partly in the nature of all friendly concerted action: they stirred a
spirit of enthusiasm in which it was not easy, under conditions equally
genuine, to distinguish the individual element from that which was due to
contagion; while the presence among us of the still living poet often
infused into that enthusiasm a vaguely emotional element, which otherwise
detracted from its intellectual worth. But in so far as this was a
drawback to the intended action of the Societies, it was one only in the
most negative sense; nor can we doubt, that, to a certain extent, Mr.
Browning’s best influence was promoted by it. The hysterical sensibilities
which, for some years past, he had unconsciously but not unfrequently
aroused in the minds of women, and even of men, were a morbid development
of that influence, which its open and systematic extension tended rather
to diminish than to increase.

It is also a matter of history that Robert Browning had many deep and
constant admirers in England, and still more in America,* long before this
organized interest had developed itself. Letters received from often
remote parts of the United States had been for many years a detail of his
daily experience; and even when they consisted of the request for an
autograph, an application to print selections from his works, or a mere
expression of schoolboy pertness or schoolgirl sentimentality, they bore
witness to his wide reputation in that country, and the high esteem in
which he was held there.** The names of Levi and Celia Thaxter of Boston
had long, I believe, been conspicuous in the higher ranks of his
disciples, though they first occur in his correspondence at about this
date. I trust I may take for granted Mrs. Thaxter’s permission to publish
a letter from her.

Newtonville, Massachusetts: March 14, 1880.

My dear Mr. Browning:

Your note reached me this morning, but it belonged to my husband, for it
was he who wrote to you; so I gave it to him, glad to put into his hands
so precious a piece of manuscript, for he has for you and all your work an
enthusiastic appreciation such as is seldom found on this planet: it is
not possible that the admiration of one mortal for another can exceed his
feeling for you. You might have written for him,

You should see his fine wrath and scorn for the idiocy that doesn’t at
once comprehend you!

He knows every word you have ever written; long ago ‘Sordello’ was an open
book to him from title-page to closing line, and all you have
printed since has been as eagerly and studiously devoured. He reads you
aloud (and his reading is a fine art) to crowds of astonished people, he
swears by you, he thinks no one save Shakspere has a right to be mentioned
in the same century with you. You are the great enthusiasm of his life.

Pardon me, you are smiling, I dare say. You hear any amount of such
things, doubtless. But a genuine living appreciation is always worth
having in this old world, it is like a strong fresh breeze from off the
brine, that puts a sense of life and power into a man. You cannot be the
worse for it. Yours very sincerely, Celia Thaxter.

When Mr. Thaxter died, in February 1885, his son wrote to Mr. Browning to
beg of him a few lines to be inscribed on his father’s tombstone. The
little poem by which the request was answered has not yet, I believe, been
published.

‘Written to be inscribed on the gravestone of Levi Thaxter.’

Thou, whom these eyes saw never,—say friends true Who say my soul,
helped onward by my song, Though all unwittingly, has helped thee too? I
gave but of the little that I knew: How were the gift requited, while
along Life’s path I pace, could’st thou make weakness strong, Help me with
knowledge—for Life’s old, Death’s new! R. B. April 19, ’85.

A publication which connected itself with the labours of the Society,
without being directly inspired by it, was the annotated ‘Strafford’
prepared by Miss Hickey for the use of students. It may be agreeable to
those who use the little work to know the estimate in which Mr. Browning
held it. He wrote as follows:

19, Warwick Crescent, W.: February 15, 1884.

Dear Miss Hickey,—I have returned the Proofs by post,—nothing
can be better than your notes—and with a real wish to be of use, I
read them carefully that I might detect never so tiny a fault,—but I
found none—unless (to show you how minutely I searched,) it should
be one that by ‘thriving in your contempt,’ I meant simply ‘while you
despise them, and for all that, they thrive and are powerful to do you
harm.’ The idiom you prefer—quite an authorized one—comes to
much the same thing after all.

You must know how much I grieve at your illness—temporary as I will
trust it to be—I feel all your goodness to me—or whatever in
my books may be taken for me—well, I wish you knew how thoroughly I
feel it—and how truly I am and shall ever be Yours affectionately,
Robert Browning.

From the time of the foundation of the New Shakspere Society, Mr. Browning
was its president. In 1880 he became a member of the Wordsworth Society.
Two interesting letters to Professor Knight, dated respectively 1880 and
1887, connect themselves with the working of the latter; and, in spite of
their distance in time, may therefore be given together. The poem which
formed the subject of the first was ‘The Daisy’;* the selection referred
to in the second was that made in 1888 by Professor Knight for the
Wordsworth Society, with the co-operation of Mr. Browning and other
eminent literary men.

19, Warwick Crescent, W.: July 9, ’80.

My dear Sir,—You pay me a compliment in caring for my opinion—but,
such as it is, a very decided one it must be. On every account, your
method of giving the original text, and subjoining in a note the
variations, each with its proper date, is incontestably preferable to any
other. It would be so, if the variations were even improvements—there
would be pleasure as well as profit in seeing what was good grow visibly
better. But—to confine ourselves to the single ‘proof’ you have sent
me—in every case the change is sadly for the worse: I am quite
troubled by such spoilings of passage after passage as I should have
chuckled at had I chanced upon them in some copy pencil-marked with
corrections by Jeffrey or Gifford: indeed, they are nearly as wretched as
the touchings-up of the ‘Siege of Corinth’ by the latter. If ever diabolic
agency was caught at tricks with ‘apostolic’ achievement (see page 9)—and
‘apostolic’, with no ‘profanity’ at all, I esteem these poems to be—surely
you may bid it ‘aroint’ ‘about and all about’ these desecrated stanzas—each
of which, however, thanks to your piety, we may hail, I trust, with a
hearty

Believe me, my dear Sir, Yours very sincerely, Robert Browning.

19, Warwick Crescent, W.: March 23, ’87.

Dear Professor Knight,—I have seemed to neglect your commission
shamefully enough: but I confess to a sort of repugnance to classifying
the poems as even good and less good: because in my heart I fear I should
do it almost chronologically—so immeasureably superior seem to me
the ‘first sprightly runnings’. Your selection would appear to be
excellent; and the partial admittance of the later work prevents one from
observing the too definitely distinguishing black line between supremely
good and—well, what is fairly tolerable—from Wordsworth,
always understand! I have marked a few of the early poems, not included in
your list—I could do no other when my conscience tells me that I
never can be tired of loving them: while, with the best will in the world,
I could never do more than try hard to like them.*

You see, I go wholly upon my individual likings and distastes: that other
considerations should have their weight with other people is natural and
inevitable. Ever truly yours, Robert Browning.

Many thanks for the volume just received—that with the
correspondence. I hope that you restore the swan simile so ruthlessly cut
away from ‘Dion’.

In 1884 he was again invited, and again declined, to stand for the Lord
Rectorship of the University of St. Andrews. In the same year he received
the LL.D. degree of the University of Edinburgh; and in the following was
made Honorary President of the Associated Societies of that city.* During
the few days spent there on the occasion of his investiture, he was the
guest of Professor Masson, whose solicitous kindness to him is still
warmly remembered in the family.

The interest in Mr. Browning as a poet is beginning to spread in Germany.
There is room for wonder that it should not have done so before, though
the affinities of his genius are rather with the older than with the more
modern German mind. It is much more remarkable that, many years ago, his
work had already a sympathetic exponent in Italy. Signor Nencioni,
Professor of Literature in Florence, had made his acquaintance at Siena,
and was possibly first attracted to him through his wife, although I never
heard that it was so. He was soon, however, fascinated by Mr. Browning’s
poetry, and made it an object of serious study; he largely quoted from,
and wrote on it, in the Roman paper ‘Fanfulla della Domenica’, in 1881 and
1882; and published last winter what is, I am told, an excellent article
on the same subject, in the ‘Nuova Antologia’. Two years ago he travelled
from Rome to Venice (accompanied by Signor Placci), for the purpose of
seeing him. He is fond of reciting passages from the works, and has even
made attempts at translation: though he understands them too well not to
pronounce them, what they are for every Latin language, untranslatable.

In 1883 Mr. Browning added another link to the ‘golden’ chain of verse
which united England and Italy. A statue of Goldoni was about to be
erected in Venice. The ceremonies of the occasion were to include the
appearance of a volume—or album—of appropriate poems; and
Cavaliere Molmenti, its intending editor, a leading member of the
‘Erection Committee’, begged Mr. Browning to contribute to it. It was also
desired that he should be present at the unveiling.* He was unable to
grant this request, but consented to write a poem. This sonnet to Goldoni
also deserves to be more widely known, both for itself and for the manner
of its production. Mr. Browning had forgotten, or not understood, how soon
the promise concerning it must be fulfilled, and it was actually scribbled
off while a messenger, sent by Signor Molmenti, waited for it.

Goldoni,—good, gay, sunniest of souls,—Glassing half Venice in
that verse of thine,—What though it just reflect the shade and shine
Of common life, nor render, as it rolls Grandeur and gloom? Sufficient for
thy shoals Was Carnival: Parini’s depths enshrine Secrets unsuited to that
opaline Surface of things which laughs along thy scrolls. There throng the
people: how they come and go Lisp the soft language, flaunt the bright
garb,—see,—On Piazza, Calle, under Portico And over Bridge!
Dear king of Comedy, Be honoured! Thou that didst love Venice so, Venice,
and we who love her, all love thee!

Venice, Nov. 27, 1883.

A complete bibliography would take account of three other sonnets, ‘The
Founder of the Feast’, 1884, ‘The Names’, 1884, and ‘Why I am a Liberal’,
1886, to which I shall have occasion to refer; but we decline insensibly
from these on to the less important or more fugitive productions which
such lists also include, and on which it is unnecessary or undesirable
that any stress should be laid.

In 1885 he was joined in Venice by his son. It was ‘Penini’s’ first return
to the country of his birth, his first experience of the city which he had
only visited in his nurse’s arms; and his delight in it was so great that
the plan shaped itself in his father’s mind of buying a house there, which
should serve as ‘pied-a-terre’ for the family, but more especially as a
home for him. Neither the health nor the energies of the younger Mr.
Browning had ever withstood the influence of the London climate; a foreign
element was undoubtedly present in his otherwise thoroughly English
constitution. Everything now pointed to his settling in Italy, and
pursuing his artist life there, only interrupting it by occasional visits
to London and Paris. His father entered into negotiations for the Palazzo
Manzoni, next door to the former Hotel de l’Univers; and the purchase was
completed, so far as he was concerned, before he returned to England. The
fact is related, and his own position towards it described in a letter to
Mrs. Charles Skirrow, written from Venice.

Palazzo Giustiniani Recanati, S. Moise: Nov. 15, ’85.

My two dear friends will have supposed, with plenty of reason, that I
never got the kind letter some weeks ago. When it came, I was in the
middle of an affair, conducted by letters of quite another kind, with
people abroad: and as I fancied that every next day might bring me news
very interesting to me and likely to be worth telling to the dear friends,
I waited and waited—and only two days since did the matter come to a
satisfactory conclusion—so, as the Irish song has it, ‘Open your
eyes and die with surprise’ when I inform you that I have purchased the
Manzoni Palace here, on the Canal Grande, of its owner, Marchese
Montecucculi, an Austrian and an absentee—hence the delay of
communication. I did this purely for Pen—who became at once simply
infatuated with the city which won my whole heart long before he was born
or thought of. I secure him a perfect domicile, every facility for his
painting and sculpture, and a property fairly worth, even here and now,
double what I gave for it—such is the virtue in these parts of ready
money! I myself shall stick to London—which has been so eminently
good and gracious to me—so long as God permits; only, when the
inevitable outrage of Time gets the better of my body—(I shall not
believe in his reaching my soul and proper self)—there will be a
capital retreat provided: and meantime I shall be able to ‘take mine ease
in mine own inn’ whenever so minded. There, my dear friends! I trust now
to be able to leave very shortly; the main business cannot be formally
concluded before two months at least—through the absence of the
Marchese,—who left at once to return to his duties as commander of
an Austrian ship; but the necessary engagement to sell and buy at a
specified price is made in due legal form, and the papers will be sent to
me in London for signature. I hope to get away the week after next at
latest,—spite of the weather in England which to-day’s letters
report as ‘atrocious’,—and ours, though variable, is in the main
very tolerable and sometimes perfect; for all that, I yearn to be at home
in poor Warwick Crescent, which must do its best to make me forget my new
abode. I forget you don’t know Venice. Well then, the Palazzo Manzoni is
situate on the Grand Canal, and is described by Ruskin,—to give no
other authority,—as ‘a perfect and very rich example of Byzantine
Renaissance: its warm yellow marbles are magnificent.’ And again—’an
exquisite example (of Byzantine Renaissance) as applied to domestic
architecture.’ So testify the ‘Stones of Venice’. But we will talk about
the place, over a photograph, when I am happy enough to be with you again.