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[2] Honor the etext refund and replacement provisions of this "Small Print!" statement. *END*THE SMALL PRINT! FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN ETEXTS*Ver.04.29.93*END* Life of Browning by William Sharp Please note: Corson, Hiram. An Introduction to the Study of Robert Browning's Poetry, Orr, Mrs. Sutherland. Life and Letters of Robert Browning, 2nd edition. Sharp, William. Life of Robert Browning. [Note on text: Italicized words or phrases are capitalised. Life of Robert Browning by William Sharp. Contents. Chapter 1.London, Robert Browning's birthplace; his immediate predecessors and contemporaries in literature, art, and music; born May 7th, 1812; origin of the Browning family; assertions as to its Semitic connection apparently groundless; the poet a putative descendant of the Captain Micaiah Browning mentioned by Macaulay; Robert Browning's mother of Scottish and German origin; his father a man of exceptional powers, artist, poet, critic, student; Mr. Browning's opinion of his son's writings; the home in Camberwell; Robert Browning's childhood; concerning his optimism; his fondness for Carravaggio's "Andromeda and Perseus"; his poetic precocity; origin of "The Flight of the Duchess"; writes Byronic verse; is sent to school at Peckham; his holiday afternoons; sees London by night, from Herne Hill; the significance of the spectacle to him. Chapter 2.He wishes to be a poet; writes in the style of Byron and Pope; the "Death of Harold"; his poems, written when twelve years old, shown to Miss Flower; the Rev. W. J. Fox's criticisms on them; he comes across Shelley's "Daemon of the World"; Mrs. Browning procures Shelley's poems, also those of Keats, for her son; the perusal of these volumes proves an important event in his poetic development; he leaves school when fourteen years old, and studies at home under a tutor; attends a few lectures at University College, 1829-30; chooses his career, at the age of twenty; earliest record of his utterances concerning his youthful life printed in `Century Magazine', 1881; he plans a series of monodramatic epics; Browning's lifework, collectively one monodramatic "epic"; Shakespeare's and Browning's methods compared; Browning writes "Pauline" in 1832; his own criticism on it; his parents' opinions; his aunt's generous gift; the poem published in January 1833; description of the poem; written under the inspiring stimulus of Shelley; its autopsychical significance; its importance to the student of the poet's works; quotations from "Pauline". Chapter 3.The public reception of "Pauline"; criticisms thereupon; Mr. Fox's notice in the `Monthly Repository', and its results; Dante Gabriel Rossetti reads "Pauline" and writes to the author; Browning's reference to Tennyson's reading of "Maud" in 1855; Browning frequents literary society; reads at the British Museum; makes the acquaintance of Charles Dickens and "Ion" Talfourd; a volume of poems by Tennyson published simultaneously with "Pauline"; in 1833 he commences his travels; goes to Russia; the sole record of his experiences there to be found in the poem "Ivan Ivanovitch", published in `Dramatic Idyls', 1879; his acquaintance with Mazzini; Browning goes to Italy; visits Asolo, whence he drew hints for "Sordello" and "Pippa Passes"; in 1834 he returns to Camberwell; in autumn of 1834 and winter of 1835 commences "Sordello", writes "Paracelsus", and one or two short poems; his love for Venice; a new voice audible in "Johannes Agricola" and "Porphyria"; "Paracelsus", published in 1835; his own explanation of it; his love of walking in the dark; some of "Paracelsus" and of "Strafford" composed in a wood near Dulwich; concerning "Paracelsus" and Browning's sympathy with the scientific spirit; description and scope of the poem; quotations therefrom; estimate of the work, and its four lyrics. Chapter 4.Criticisms upon "Paracelsus", important one written by John Forster; Browning meets Macready at the house of Mr. Fox; personal description of the poet; Macready's opinion of the poem; Browning spends New Year's Day, 1836, at the house of the tragedian and meets John Forster; Macready urges him to write a play; his subsequent interview with the tragedian; he plans a drama to be entitled "Narses"; meets Wordsworth and Walter Savage Landor at a supper party, when the young poet is toasted, and Macready again proposes that Browning should write a play, from which arose the idea of "Strafford"; his acquaintance with Wordsworth and Landor; MS. of "Strafford" accepted; its performance at Covent Garden Theatre on the 26th May 1837; runs for five nights; the author's comments; the drama issued by Messrs. Longman & Co.; the performance in 1886; estimate of "Strafford"; Browning's dramas; comparison between the Elizabethan and Victorian dramatic eras; Browning's soul-depictive faculty; his dramatic method; estimate of his dramas; Landor's acknowledgment of the dedication to him of "Luria". Chapter 5."Profundity" and "Simplicity"; the faculty of wonder; Browning's first conception of "Pippa Passes"; his residence in London; his country walks; his ways and habits, and his heart-episodes; debates whether to become a clergyman; is "Pippa Passes" a drama? estimate of the poem; Browning's rambles on Wimbledon Common and in Dulwich Wood, where he composes his lines upon Shelley; asserts there is romance in Camberwell as well as in Italy; "Sordello"; the charge of obscurity against "Sordello"; the nature and intention of the poem; quotations therefrom; anecdote about Douglas Jerrold; Tennyson's, Carlyle's, and M. Odysse Barot's opinions on "Sordello"; "enigmatic" poetry; in 1863 Browning contemplated the re-writing of "Sordello"; dedication to the French critic, Milsand. Chapter 6.Browning's three great dramatic poems; "The Ring and the Book" his finest work; its uniqueness; Carlyle's criticism of it; Poetry versus Tour-de-Force; "The Ring and the Book" begun in 1866; analysis of the poem; kinship of "The Ring and the Book" and "Aurora Leigh"; explanation of title; the idea taken from a parchment volume Browning picked up in Florence; the poem planned at Casa Guidi; "O Lyric Love", etc.; description and analysis of "The Ring and the Book", with quotations; compared as a poem with "The Inn Album", "Pauline", "Asolando", "Men and Women", etc.; imaginary volumes, to be entitled "Transcripts from Life" and "Flowers o' the Vine"; Browning's greatest period; Browning's primary importance. Chapter 7.Early life of Elizabeth Barrett Browning; born in 1820;* the chief sorrow of her life; the Barrett family settle in London; "The Cry of the Children" and its origin; Miss Barrett's friends; effect on her of Browning's poetry; she makes Browning's acquaintance in 1846; her early belief in him as a poet; her physical delicacy and her sensitiveness of feeling; personal appearance of Robert Browning; his "electric" hand; Elizabeth Barrett discerns his personal worth, and is susceptible to the strong humanity of Browning's song; Mr. Barrett's jealousy; their engagement; Miss Barrett's acquaintance with Mrs. Jameson; quiet marriage in 1846; Mr. Barrett's resentment; the Brownings go to Paris; thence to Italy with Mrs. Jameson; Wordsworth's comments; residence in Pisa; "Sonnets from the Portuguese"; in the spring they go to Florence, thence to Ancona, where "The Guardian Angel" was written; Casa Guidi; W. W. Story's account of the rooms at Casa Guidi; perfect union. — Chapter 8.March 1849, birth of Robert Wiedemann Barrett Browning; Browning writes his "Christmas Eve and Easter Day"; "Casa Guidi Windows" commenced; 1850, they go to Rome; "Two in the Campagna"; proposal to confer poet-laureateship on Mrs. Browning; return to London; winter in Paris; summer in London; Kenyon's friendship; return in autumn to Casa Guidi; Browning's Essay on Shelley for the twenty-five spurious Shelley letters; midsummer at Baths of Lucca, where "In a Balcony" was in part written; winter of 1853-4 in Rome; record of work; "Pen's" illness; "Ben Karshook's Wisdom"; return to Florence; (1856) "Men and Women" published; the Brownings go to London; in summer "Aurora Leigh" issued; 1858, Mrs. Browning's waning health; 1855-64 comparatively unproductive period with R. Browning; record of work; July 1855, they travel to Normandy; "Legend of Pornic"; Mrs. Browning's ardent interest in the Italian struggle of 1859; winter in Rome; "Poems before Congress"; her last poem, "North and South"; death of Mrs. Browning at Casa Guidi, 28th June 1861. Chapter 9.Browning's allusions to death of his wife; Miss Browning resides with her brother from 1866; 1868, collected works published; first part of "The Ring and the Book" published in November 1866; "Herve Riel" written; Browning's growing popularity; Tauchnitz editions of his poems in 1872; also first book of selections; dedication to Lord Tennyson; 1877, he goes to La Saisiaz, near Geneva; "La Saisiaz" and "The Two Poets of Croisic" published 1878; Browning's later poems; Browning Society established 1881; Browning's letter thereupon to Mr. Yates; trips abroad; his London residences; his last letter to Tennyson; revisits Asolo; Palazzo Rezzonico; his belief in immortality; his death, Thursday, Dec. 12th, 1889; funeral in Westminster Abbey; Sonnet by George Meredith; new star in Orion; R. Browning's place in literature; Summary, etc. Note. In all important respects I leave this volume to speak for itself. For obvious reasons it does not pretend to be more than a `Memoire pour servir': in the nature of things, the definitive biography cannot appear for many years to come. None the less gratefully may I take the present opportunity to express my indebtedness to Mr. R. Barrett Browning, and to other relatives and intimate friends of Robert Browning, who have given me serviceable information, and otherwise rendered kindly aid. For some of the hitherto unpublished details my thanks are, in particular, due to Mrs. Fraser Corkran and Miss Alice Corkran, and to other old friends of the poet and his family, here, in Italy, and in America; though in one or two instances, I may add, I had them from Robert Browning himself. It is with pleasure that I further acknowledge my indebtedness to Dr. Furnivall, for the loan of the advance-proofs of his privately-printed pamphlet on "Browning's Ancestors"; and to the Browning Society's Publications — particularly to Mrs. Sutherland Orr's and Dr. Furnivall's biographical and bibliographical contributions thereto; to Mr. Gosse's biographical article in the `Century Magazine' for 1881; to Mr. Ingram's `Life of E. B. Browning'; and to the `Memoirs of Anna Jameson', the `Italian Note-Books' of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mr. G. S. Hillard's `Six Months in Italy' (1853), and the Lives and Correspondence of Macready, Miss Mitford, Leigh Hunt, and Walter Savage Landor. I regret that the imperative need of concision has prevented the insertion of many of the letters, anecdotes, and reminiscences, so generously placed at my disposal; but possibly I may have succeeded in educing from them some essential part of that light which they undoubtedly cast upon the personality and genius of the poet. ———————————— Life of Robert Browning. ———————————— Chapter 1.It must, to admirers of Browning's writings, appear singularly appropriate that so cosmopolitan a poet was born in London. It would seem as though something of that mighty complex life, so confusedly petty to the narrow vision, so grandiose and even majestic to the larger ken, had blent with his being from the first. What fitter birthplace for the poet whom a comrade has called the "Subtlest Assertor of the Soul in Song", the poet whose writings are indeed a mirror of the age? A man may be in all things a Londoner and yet be a provincial. The accident of birthplace does not necessarily involve parochialism of the soul. It is not the village which produces the Hampden, but the Hampden who immortalises the village. It is a favourite jest of Rusticus that his urban brother has the manner of Omniscience and the knowledge of a parish beadle. Nevertheless, though the strongest blood insurgent in the metropolitan heart is not that which is native to it, one might well be proud to have had one's atom-pulse atune from the first with the large rhythm of the national life at its turbulent, congested, but ever ebullient centre. Certainly Browning was not the man to be ashamed of his being a Londoner, much less to deny his natal place. He was proud of it: through good sense, no doubt, but possibly also through some instinctive apprehension of the fact that the great city was indeed the fit mother of such a son. "Ashamed of having been born in the greatest city of the world!" he exclaimed on one occasion; "what an extraordinary thing to say! It suggests a wavelet in a muddy shallow grimily contorting itself because it had its birth out in the great ocean." On the day of the poet's funeral in Westminster Abbey, one of the most eminent of his peers remarked to me that Browning came to us as one coming into his own. This is profoundly true. There was in good sooth a mansion prepared against his advent. Long ago, we should have surrendered as to a conqueror: now, however, we know that princes of the mind, though they must be valorous and potent as of yore, can enter upon no heritance save that which naturally awaits them, and has been made theirs by long and intricate processes. The lustrum which saw the birth of Robert Browning, that is the third in the nineteenth century, was a remarkable one indeed. Thackeray came into the world some months earlier than the great poet, Charles Dickens within the same twelvemonth, and Tennyson three years sooner, when also Elizabeth Barrett was born, and the foremost naturalist of modern times first saw the light. It is a matter of significance that the great wave of scientific thought which ultimately bore forward on its crest so many famous men, from Brewster and Faraday to Charles Darwin, had just begun to rise with irresistible impulsion. Lepsius's birth was in 1813, and that of the great Flemish novelist, Henri Conscience, in 1812: about the same period were the births of Freiligrath, Gutzkow, and Auerbach, respectively one of the most lyrical poets, the most potent dramatist, the most charming romancer of Germany: and, also, in France, of Theophile Gautier and Alfred de Musset. Among representatives of the other arts — with two of which Browning must ever be closely associated — Mendelssohn and Chopin were born in 1809, and Schumann, Liszt, and Wagner within the four succeeding years: within which space also came Diaz and Meissonier and the great Millet. Other high names there are upon the front of the century. Macaulay, Cardinal Newman, John Stuart Mill (one of the earliest, by the way, to recognise the genius of Browning), Alexandre Dumas, George Sand, Victor Hugo, Ampere, Quinet, Prosper Merimee, Sainte-Beuve, Strauss, Montalambert, are among the laurel-bearers who came into existence betwixt 1800 and 1812. When Robert Browning was born in London in 1812, Sheridan had still four years to live; Jeremy Bentham was at the height of his contemporary reputation, and Godwin was writing glibly of the virtues of humanity and practising the opposite qualities, while Crabbe was looked upon as one of the foremost of living poets. Wordsworth was then forty, Sir Walter Scott forty-one, Coleridge forty-two, Walter Savage Landor and Charles Lamb each in his forty-fifth year. Byron was four-and-twenty, Shelley not yet quite of age, two radically different men, Keats and Carlyle, both youths of seventeen. Abroad, Laplace was in his maturity, with fifteen years more yet to live; Joubert with twelve; Goethe, with twenty; Lamarck, the Schlegels, Cuvier, Chateaubriand, Hegel, Niebuehr (to specify some leading names only), had many years of work before them. Schopenhauer was only four-and-twenty, while Beranger was thirty-two. The Polish poet Mickiewicz was a boy of fourteen, and Poushkin was but a twelvemonth older; Heine, a lad of twelve, was already enamoured of the great Napoleonic legend. The foremost literary critic of the century was running about the sands of Boulogne, or perhaps wandering often along the ramparts of the old town, introspective even then, with something of that rare and insatiable curiosity which we all now recognise as so distinctive of Sainte-Beuve. Again, the greatest creative literary artist of the century, in prose at any rate, was leading an apparently somewhat indolent schoolboy life at Tours, undreamful yet of enormous debts, colossal undertakings, gigantic failures, and the `Comedie Humaine'. In art, Sir Henry Raeburn, William Blake, Flaxman, Canova, Thorwaldsen, Crome, Sir Thomas Lawrence, Constable, Sir David Wilkie, and Turner were in the exercise of their happiest faculties: as were, in the usage of theirs, Beethoven, Weber, Schubert, Spohr, Donizetti, and Bellini. It is not inadvisedly that I make this specification of great names, of men who were born coincidentally with, or were in the broader sense contemporaries of Robert Browning. There is no such thing as a fortuitous birth. Creation does not occur spontaneously, as in that drawing of David Scott's where from the footprint of the Omnipotent spring human spirits and fiery stars. Literally indeed, as a great French writer has indicated, a man is the child of his time. It is a matter often commented upon by students of literature, that great men do not appear at the beginning, but rather at the acme of a period. They are not the flying scud of the coming wave, but the gleaming crown of that wave itself. The epoch expends itself in preparation for these great ones. If Nature's first law were not a law of excess, the economy of life would have meagre results. I think it is Turgeniev who speaks somewhere of her as a gigantic Titan, working in gloomy silence, with the same savage intentness upon a subtler twist of a flea's joints as upon the Destinies of Man. If there be a more foolish cry than that poetry is on the wane, it is that the great days had passed away even before Robert Browning and Alfred Tennyson were born. The way was prepared for Browning, as it was for Shakespeare: as it is, beyond doubt, for the next high peer of these. There were `Roberts' among the sons of the Browning family for at least four generations. It has been affirmed, on disputable authority, that the surname is the English equivalent for Bruning, and that the family is of Teutonic origin. Possibly: but this origin is too remote to be of any practical concern. Browning himself, it may be added, told Mr. Moncure Conway that the original name was De Bruni. It is not a matter of much importance: the poet was, personally and to a great extent in his genius, Anglo-Saxon. Though there are plausible grounds for the assumption, I can find nothing to substantiate the common assertion that, immediately, or remotely, his people were Jews.* — As to Browning's physiognomy and personal traits, this much may be granted: if those who knew him were told he was a Jew they would not be much surprised. In his exuberant vitality, in his sensuous love of music and the other arts, in his combined imaginativeness and shrewdness of common sense, in his superficial expansiveness and actual reticence, he would have been typical enough of the potent and artistic race for whom he has so often of late been claimed. What, however, is most to the point is that neither to curious acquaintances nor to intimate friends, neither to Jews nor Gentiles, did he ever admit more than that he was a good Protestant, and sprung of a Puritan stock. He was tolerant of all religious forms, but with a natural bias towards Anglican Evangelicalism. In appearance there was, perhaps, something of the Semite in Robert Browning: yet this is observable but slightly in the portraits of him during the last twenty years, and scarcely at all in those which represent him as a young man. It is most marked in the drawing by Rudolf Lehmann, representing Browning at the age of forty-seven, where he looks out upon us with a physiognomy which is, at least, as much distinctively Jewish as English. Possibly the large dark eyes (so unlike both in colour and shape what they were in later life) and curved nose and full lips, with the oval face, may have been, as it were, seen judaically by the artist. These characteristics, again, are greatly modified in Mr. Lehmann's subsequent portrait in oils. The poet's paternal great-grandfather, who was owner of the Woodyates Inn, in the parish of Pentridge, in Dorsetshire, claimed to come of good west-country stock. Browning believed, but always conscientiously maintained there was no proof in support of the assumption, that he was a descendant of the Captain Micaiah Browning who, as Macaulay relates in his `History of England', raised the siege of Derry in 1689 by springing the boom across Lough Foyle, and perished in the act. The same ancestral line is said to comprise the Captain Browning who commanded the ship `The Holy Ghost', which conveyed Henry V. to France before he fought the Battle of Agincourt, and in recognition of whose services two waves, said to represent waves of the sea, were added to his coat of arms. It is certainly a point of some importance in the evidence, as has been indicated, that these arms were displayed by the gallant Captain Micaiah, and are borne by the present family. That the poet was a pure-bred Englishman in the strictest sense, however, as has commonly been asserted, is not the case. His mother was Scottish, through her mother and by birth, but her father was the son of a German from Hamburg, named Wiedemann, who, by the way, in connection with his relationship as maternal grandfather to the poet, it is interesting to note, was an accomplished draughtsman and musician.* Browning's paternal grandmother, again, was a Creole. As Mrs. Orr remarks, this pedigree throws a valuable light on the vigour and variety of the poet's genius. Possibly the main current of his ancestry is as little strictly English as German. A friend sends me the following paragraph from a Scottish paper: — "What of the Scottish Brownings? I had it long ago from one of the name that the Brownings came originally from Ayrshire, and that several families of them emigrated to the North of Ireland during the times of the Covenanters. There is, moreover, a small town or village in the North of Ireland called Browningstown. Might not the poet be related to these Scottish Brownings?" — Browning's great-grandfather, as indicated above, was a small proprietor in Dorsetshire. His son, whether perforce or from choice, removed to London when he was a youth, and speedily obtained a clerkship in the Bank of England, where he remained for fifty years, till he was pensioned off in 1821 with over 400 Pounds a year. He died in 1833. His wife, to whom he was married in or about 1780, was one Margaret Morris Tittle, a Creole, born in the West Indies. Her portrait, by Wright of Derby, used to hang in the poet's dining-room. They resided, Mr. R. Barrett Browning tells me, in Battersea, where his grandfather was their first-born. The paternal grandfather of the poet decided that his three sons, Robert, William Shergold, and Reuben, should go into business, the two younger in London, the elder abroad. All three became efficient financial clerks, and attained to good positions and fair means.* The eldest, Robert, was a man of exceptional powers. He was a poet, both in sentiment and expression; and he understood, as well as enjoyed, the excellent in art. He was a scholar, too, in a reputable fashion: not indifferent to what he had learnt in his youth, nor heedless of the high opinion generally entertained for the greatest writers of antiquity, but with a particular care himself for Horace and Anacreon. As his son once told a friend, "The old gentleman's brain was a storehouse of literary and philosophical antiquities. He was completely versed in mediaeval legend, and seemed to have known Paracelsus, Faustus, and even Talmudic personages, personally" — a significant detail, by the way. He was fond of metrical composition, and his ease and grace in the use of the heroic couplet were the admiration, not only of his intellectual associates, but, in later days, of his son, who was wont to affirm, certainly in all seriousness, that expressionally his father was a finer poetic artist than himself. Some one has recorded of him that he was an authority on the Letters of Junius: fortunately he had more tangible claims than this to the esteem of his fellows. It was his boast that, notwithstanding the exigencies of his vocation, he knew as much of the history of art as any professional critic. His extreme modesty is deducible from this naive remark. He was an amateur artist, moreover, as well as poet, critic, and student. I have seen several of his drawings which are praiseworthy: his studies in portraiture, particularly, are ably touched: and, as is well known, he had an active faculty of pictorial caricature. In the intervals of leisure which beset the best regulated clerk he was addicted to making drawings of the habitual visitors to the Bank of England, in which he had obtained a post on his return, in 1803, from the West Indies, and in the enjoyment of which he remained till 1853, when he retired on a small pension. His son had an independent income, but whether from a bequest, or in the form of an allowance from his then unmarried Uncle Reuben, is uncertain. In the first year of his marriage Mr. Browning resided in an old house in Southampton Street, Peckham, and there the poet was born. The house was long ago pulled down, and another built on its site. Mr. Browning afterwards removed to another domicile in the same Peckham district. Many years later, he and his family left Camberwell and resided at Hatcham, near New Cross, where his brothers and sisters (by his father's second marriage) lived. There was a stable attached to the Hatcham house, and in it Mr. Reuben Browning kept his horse, which he let his poet-nephew ride, while he himself was at his desk in Rothschild's bank. No doubt this horse was the `York' alluded to by the poet in the letter quoted, as a footnote, at page 189 [Chapter 9] of this book. Some years after his wife's death, which occurred in 1849, Mr. Browning left Hatcham and came to Paddington, but finally went to reside in Paris, and lived there, in a small street off the Champs Elysees, till his death in 1866. The Creole strain seems to have been distinctly noticeable in Mr. Browning, so much so that it is possible it had something to do with his unwillingness to remain at St. Kitts, where he was certainly on one occasion treated cavalierly enough. The poet's complexion in youth, light and ivory-toned as it was in later life, has been described as olive, and it is said that one of his nephews, who met him in Paris in his early manhood, took him for an Italian. It has been affirmed that it was the emotional Creole strain in Browning which found expression in his passion for music.** — * The three brothers were men of liberal education and literary tastes. Mr. W. S. Browning, who died in 1874, was an author of some repute. His `History of the Huguenots' is a standard book on the subject. ** Mrs. Sutherland Orr, in her "Life and Letters of Robert Browning" (1891), (now available online) refutes these statements. — A. L., 1996. — By old friends of the family I have been told that Mr. Browning had a strong liking for children, with whom his really remarkable faculty of impromptu fiction made him a particular favourite. Sometimes he would supplement his tales by illustrations with pencil or brush. Miss Alice Corkran has shown me an illustrated coloured map, depictive of the main incidents and scenery of the `Pilgrim's Progress', which he genially made for "the children".* — He had three children himself — Robert, born May 7th, 1812, a daughter named Sarianna, after her mother, and Clara. His wife was a woman of singular beauty of nature, with a depth of religious feeling saved from narrowness of scope only by a rare serenity and a fathomless charity. Her son's loving admiration of her was almost a passion: even late in life he rarely spoke of her without tears coming to his eyes. She was, moreover, of an intellectual bent of mind, and with an artistic bias having its readiest fulfilment in music, and, to some extent, in poetry. In the latter she inclined to the Romanticists: her husband always maintained the supremacy of Pope. He looked with much dubiety upon his son's early writings, "Pauline" and "Paracelsus"; "Sordello", though he found it beyond either his artistic or his mental apprehension, he forgave, because it was written in rhymed couplets; the maturer works he regarded with sympathy and pride, with a vague admiration which passed into a clearer understanding only when his long life was drawing near its close. Of his children's company he never tired, even when they were scarce out of babyhood. He was fond of taking the little Robert in his arms, and walking to and fro with him in the dusk in "the library", soothing the child to sleep by singing to him snatches of Anacreon in the original, to a favourite old tune of his, "A Cottage in a Wood". Readers of "Asolando" will remember the allusions in that volume to "my father who was a scholar and knew Greek." A week or two before his death Browning told an American friend, Mrs. Corson, in reply to a statement of hers that no one could accuse him of letting his talents lie idle: "It would have been quite unpardonable in my case not to have done my best. My dear father put me in a condition most favourable for the best work I was capable of. When I think of the many authors who have had to fight their way through all sorts of difficulties, I have no reason to be proud of my achievements. My good father sacrificed a fortune to his convictions. He could not bear with slavery, and left India and accepted a humble bank-office in London. He secured for me all the ease and comfort that a literary man needs to do good work. It would have been shameful if I had not done my best to realise his expectations of me."* — The home of Mr. Browning was, as already stated, in Camberwell, a suburb then of less easy access than now, and where there were green trees, and groves, and enticing rural perspectives into "real" country, yet withal not without some suggestion of the metropolitan air. "The old trees Another great writer of our time was born in the same parish: and those who would know Herne Hill and the neighbourhood as it was in Browning's youth will find an enthusiastic guide in the author of `Praeterita'. Browning's childhood was a happy one. Indeed, if the poet had been able to teach in song only what he had learnt in suffering, the larger part of his verse would be singularly barren of interest. From first to last everything went well with him, with the exception of a single profound grief. This must be borne in mind by those who would estimate aright the genius of Robert Browning. It would be affectation or folly to deny that his splendid physique — a paternal inheritance, for his father died at the age of eighty-four, without having ever endured a day's illness — and the exceptionally fortunate circumstances which were his throughout life, had something to do with that superb faith of his which finds concentrated expression in the lines in Pippa's song — "God's in His Heaven, All's right with the world!" It is difficult for a happy man with an imperturbable digestion to be a pessimist. He is always inclined to give Nature the benefit of the doubt. His favourite term for this mental complaisance is "catholicity of faith", or, it may be, "a divine hope". The less fortunate brethren bewail the laws of Nature, and doubt a future readjustment, because of stomachs chronically out of order. An eminent author with a weak digestion wrote to me recently animadverting on what he calls Browning's insanity of optimism: it required no personal acquaintanceship to discern the dyspeptic well-spring of this utterance. All this may be admitted lightly without carrying the physiological argument to extremes. A man may have a liberal hope for himself and for humanity, although his dinner be habitually a martyrdom. After all, we are only dictated to by our bodies: we have not perforce to obey them. A bitter wit once remarked that the soul, if it were ever discovered, would be found embodied in the gastric juice. He was not altogether a fool, this man who had learnt in suffering what he taught in epigram; yet was he wide of the mark. As a very young child Browning was keenly susceptible to music. One afternoon his mother was playing in the twilight to herself. She was startled to hear a sound behind her. Glancing round, she beheld a little white figure distinct against an oak bookcase, and could just discern two large wistful eyes looking earnestly at her. The next moment the child had sprung into her arms, sobbing passionately at he knew not what, but, as his paroxysm of emotion subsided, whispering over and over, with shy urgency, "Play! play!" It is strange that among all his father's collection of drawings and engravings nothing had such fascination for him as an engraving of a picture of Andromeda and Perseus by Caravaggio. The story of the innocent victim and the divine deliverer was one of which in his boyhood he never tired of hearing: and as he grew older the charm of its pictorial presentment had for him a deeper and more complex significance. We have it on the authority of a friend that Browning had this engraving always before his eyes as he wrote his earlier poems. He has given beautiful commemoration to his feeling for it in "Pauline": — "Andromeda! One of his own early recollections was that of sitting on his father's knees in the library, and listening with enthralled attention to the Tale of Troy, with marvellous illustrations among the glowing coals in the fireplace; with, below all, the vaguely heard accompaniment — from the neighbouring room where Mrs. Browning sat "in her chief happiness, her hour of darkness and solitude and music" — of a wild Gaelic lament, with its insistent falling cadences. A story concerning his poetic precocity has been circulated, but is not worth repeating. Most children love jingling rhymes, and one need not be a born genius to improvise a rhyming couplet on an occasion. It is quite certain that in nothing in these early poemicules, in such at least as have been preserved without the poet's knowledge and against his will, is there anything of genuine promise. Hundreds of youngsters have written as good, or better, Odes to the Moon, Stanzas on a Favourite Canary, Lines on a Butterfly. What is much more to the point is, that at the age of eight he was able not only to read, but to take delight in Pope's translation of Homer. He used to go about declaiming certain couplets with an air of intense earnestness highly diverting to those who overheard him. About this time also he began to translate the simpler odes of Horace. One of these (viii. Bk. II.) long afterwards suggested to him the theme of his "Instans Tyrannus". It has been put on record that his sister remembers him, as a very little boy, walking round and round the dining-room table, and spanning out the scansion of his verses with his hand on the smooth mahogany. He was scarce more than a child when, one Guy Fawkes' day, he heard a woman singing an unfamiliar song, whose burden was, "Following the Queen of the Gipsies, O!" This refrain haunted him often in the after years. That beautiful fantastic romance, "The Flight of the Duchess", was born out of an insistent memory of this woman's snatch of song, heard in childhood. He was ten when, after several `passions malheureuses', this precocious Lothario plunged into a love affair whose intensity was only equalled by its hopelessness. A trifle of fifteen years' seniority and a husband complicated matters, but it was not till after the reckless expenditure of a Horatian ode upon an unclassical mistress that he gave up hope. The outcome of this was what the elder Browning regarded as a startling effusion of much Byronic verse. The young Robert yearned for wastes of ocean and illimitable sands, for dark eyes and burning caresses, for despair that nothing could quench but the silent grave, and, in particular, for hollow mocking laughter. His father looked about for a suitable school, and decided to entrust the boy's further education to Mr. Ready, of Peckham. Here he remained till he was fourteen. But already he knew the dominion of dreams. His chief enjoyment, on holiday afternoons, was to gain an unfrequented spot, where three huge elms re-echoed the tones of incoherent human music borne thitherward by the west winds across the wastes of London. Here he loved to lie and dream. Alas, those elms, that high remote coign, have long since passed to the "hidden way" whither the snows of yester year have vanished. He would lie for hours looking upon distant London — a golden city of the west literally enough, oftentimes, when the sunlight came streaming in long shafts from behind the towers of Westminster and flashed upon the gold cross of St. Paul's. The coming and going of the cloud-shadows, the sweeping of sudden rains, the dull silvern light emanating from the haze of mist shrouding the vast city, with the added transitory gleam of troubled waters, the drifting of fogs, at that distance seeming like gigantic veils constantly being moved forward and then slowly withdrawn, as though some sinister creature of the atmosphere were casting a net among all the dross and debris of human life for fantastic sustenance of its own — all this endless, ever-changing, always novel phantasmagoria had for him an extraordinary fascination. One of the memorable nights of his boyhood was an eve when he found his way, not without perturbation of spirit because of the unfamiliar solitary dark, to his loved elms. There, for the first time, he beheld London by night. It seemed to him then more wonderful and appalling than all the host of stars. There was something ominous in that heavy pulsating breath: visible, in a waning and waxing of the tremulous, ruddy glow above the black enmassed leagues of masonry; audible, in the low inarticulate moaning borne eastward across the crests of Norwood. It was then and there that the tragic significance of life first dimly awed and appealed to his questioning spirit: that the rhythm of humanity first touched deeply in him a corresponding chord. |
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