Robert Browning - Delphi Poets Series

by Robert Browning

  In his cheerful alertness, self-possession, and genial suavity Browning impressed him as an American rather than as an Englishman, though there can be no question but that no more thorough Englishman than the poet ever lived. It is a mistake, of course, to speak of him as a typical Englishman: for typical he was not, except in a very exclusive sense. Bayard Taylor describes him in reportorial fashion as being apparently about seven-and-thirty (a fairly close guess), with his dark hair already streaked with grey about the temples: with a fair complexion, just tinged with faintest olive: eyes large, clear, and grey, and nose strong and well-cut, mouth full and rather broad, and chin pointed, though not prominent: about the medium height, strong in the shoulders, but slender at the waist, with movements expressive of a combination of vigour and elasticity. With due allowance for the passage of five-and-thirty years, this description would not be inaccurate of Browning the septuagenarian.

  They did not return direct to Italy after all, but wintered in Paris with Robert Browning the elder, who had retired to a small house in a street leading off the Champs Elysees. The pension he drew from the Bank of England was a small one, but, with what he otherwise had, was sufficient for him to live in comfort. The old gentleman’s health was superb to the last, for he died in 1866 without ever having known a day’s illness.

  Spring came out and found them still in Paris, Mrs. Browning enthusiastic about Napoleon III. and interested in spiritualism: her husband serenely sceptical concerning both. In the summer they again went to London: but they appear to have seen more of Kenyon and other intimate friends than to have led a busy social life. Kenyon’s friendship and good company never ceased to have a charm for both poets. Mrs. Browning loved him almost as a brother: her husband told Bayard Taylor, on the day when that good poet and charming man called upon them, and after another visitor had departed — a man with a large rosy face and rotund body, as Taylor describes him — “there goes one of the most splendid men living — a man so noble in his friendship, so lavish in his hospitality, so large-hearted and benevolent, that he deserves to be known all over the world as Kenyon the Magnificent.”

  In the early autumn a sudden move towards Italy was again made, and after a few weeks in Paris and on the way the Brownings found themselves at home once more in Casa Guidi.

  But before this, probably indeed before they had left Paris for London, Mr. Moxon had published the now notorious Shelley forgeries. These were twenty-five spurious letters, but so cleverly manufactured that they at first deceived many people. In the preceding November Browning had been asked to write an introduction to them. This he had gladly agreed to do, eager as he was for a suitable opportunity of expressing his admiration for Shelley. When the letters reached him, he found that, genuine or not, though he never suspected they were forgeries, they contained nothing of particular import, nothing that afforded a just basis for what he had intended to say. Pledged as he was, however, to write something for Mr. Moxon’s edition of the Letters, he set about the composition of an Essay, of a general as much as of an individual nature. This he wrote in Paris, and finished by the beginning of December. It dealt with the objective and subjective poet; on the relation of the latter’s life to his work; and upon Shelley in the light of his nature, art, and character. Apart from the circumstance that it is the only independent prose writing of any length from Browning’s pen, this is an exceptionally able and interesting production.

  Dr. Furnivall deserves general gratitude for his obtaining the author’s leave to re-issue it, and for having published it as one of the papers of the Browning Society. As that enthusiastic student and good friend of the poet says in his “foretalk” to the reprint, the essay is noteworthy, not merely as a signal service to Shelley’s fame and memory, but for Browning’s statement of his own aim in his own work, both as objective and subjective poet. The same clearsightedness and impartial sympathy, which are such distinguishing characteristics of his dramatic studies of human thought and emotion, are obvious in Browning’s Shelley essay. “It would be idle to enquire,” he writes, “of these two kinds of poetic faculty in operation, which is the higher or even rarer endowment. If the subjective might seem to be the ultimate requirement of every age, the objective in the strictest state must still retain its original value. For it is with this world, as starting-point and basis alike, that we shall always have to concern ourselves; the world is not to be learned and thrown aside, but reverted to and reclaimed.”

  Of its critical subtlety — the more remarkable as by a poet-critic who revered Shelley the poet and loved and believed in Shelley the man — the best example, perhaps, is in those passages where he alludes to the charge against the poet’s moral nature — “charges which, if substantiated to their wide breadth, would materially disturb, I do not deny, our reception and enjoyment of his works, however wonderful the artistic qualities of these. For we are not sufficiently supplied with instances of genius of his order to be able to pronounce certainly how many of its constituent parts have been tasked and strained to the production of a given lie, and how high and pure a mood of the creative mind may be dramatically simulated as the poet’s habitual and exclusive one.”

  The large charity, the liberal human sympathy, the keen critical acumen of this essay, make one wish that the author had spared us a “Sludge the Medium” or a “Pacchiarotto”, or even a “Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau”, and given us more of such honourable work in “the other harmony”.

  Glad as the Brownings were to be home again at Casa Guidi, they could not enjoy the midsummer heats of Florence, and so went to the Baths of Lucca. It was a delight for them to ramble among the chestnut-woods of the high Tuscan forests, and to go among the grape-vines where the sunburnt vintagers were busy. Once Browning paid a visit to that remote hill-stream and waterfall, high up in a precipitous glen, where, more than three-score years earlier, Shelley had been wont to amuse himself by sitting naked on a rock in the sunlight, reading `Herodotus’ while he cooled, and then plunging into the deep pool beneath him — to emerge, further up stream, and then climb through the spray of the waterfall till he was like a glittering human wraith in the middle of a dissolving rainbow.

  Those Tuscan forests, that high crown of Lucca, must always have special associations for lovers of poetry. Here Shelley lived, rapt in his beautiful dreams, and translated the `Symposium’ so that his wife might share something of his delight in Plato. Here, ten years later, Heine sneered, and laughed and wept, and sneered again — drank tea with “la belle Irlandaise”, flirted with Francesca “la ballerina”, and wrote alternately with a feathered quill from the breast of a nightingale and with a lancet steeped in aquafortis: and here, a quarter of a century afterward, Robert and Elizabeth Browning also laughed and wept and “joyed i’ the sun,” dreamed many dreams, and touched chords of beauty whose vibration has become incorporated with the larger rhythm of all that is high and enduring in our literature.

  On returning to Florence (Browning with the MS. of the greater part of his splendid fragmentary tragedy, “In a Balcony”, composed mainly while walking alone through the forest glades), Mrs. Browning found that the chill breath of the `tramontana’ was affecting her lungs, so a move was made to Rome, for the passing of the winter (1853-4). In the spring their little boy, their beloved “Pen”,* became ill with malaria. This delayed their return to Florence till well on in the summer. During this stay in Rome Mrs. Browning rapidly proceeded with “Aurora Leigh”, and Browning wrote several of his “Men and Women”, including the exquisite `Love among the Ruins’, with its novel metrical music; `Fra Lippo Lippi’, where the painter, already immortalised by Landor, has his third warrant of perpetuity; the `Epistle of Karshish’ (in part); `Memorabilia’ (composed on the Campagna); `Saul’, a portion of which had been written and published ten years previously, that noble and lofty utterance, with its trumpet-like note of the regnant spirit; the concluding part of “In a Balcony”; and `Holy Cross Day’ — besides, probably, one or two others. In the late sp
ring (April 27th) also, he wrote the short dactylic lyric, `Ben Karshook’s Wisdom’. This little poem was given to a friend for appearance in one of the then popular `Keepsakes’ — literally given, for Browning never contributed to magazines. The very few exceptions to this rule were the result of a kindliness stronger than scruple: as when (1844), at request of Lord Houghton (then Mr. Monckton Milnes), he sent `Tokay’, the `Flower’s Name’, and `Sibrandus Schafnaburgensis’, to “help in making up some magazine numbers for poor Hood, then at the point of death from hemorrhage of the lungs, occasioned by the enlargement of the heart, which had been brought on by the wearing excitement of ceaseless and excessive literary toil.” As `Ben Karshook’s Wisdom’, though it has been reprinted in several quarters, will not be found in any volume of Browning’s works, and was omitted from “Men and Women” by accident, and from further collections by forgetfulness, it may be fitly quoted here. Karshook, it may be added, is the Hebraic word for a thistle.

  I.

  ”`Would a man ‘scape the rod?’ —

  Rabbi Ben Karshook saith,

  `See that he turns to God

  The day before his death.’

  `Ay, could a man inquire

  When it shall come!’ I say.

  The Rabbi’s eye shoots fire —

  `Then let him turn to-day!’

  II.

  Quoth a young Sadducee, —

  `Reader of many rolls,

  Is it so certain we

  Have, as they tell us, souls?’ —

  `Son, there is no reply!’

  The Rabbi bit his beard:

  `Certain, a soul have I — —

  WE may have none,’ he sneer’d.

  Thus Karshook, the Hiram’s-Hammer,

  The Right-Hand Temple column,

  Taught babes their grace in grammar,

  And struck the simple, solemn.”

  —

  * So-called, it is asserted, from his childish effort to pronounce

  a difficult name (Wiedemann). But despite the good authority

  for this statement, it is impossible not to credit rather

  the explanation given by Nathaniel Hawthorne, who, moreover,

  affords the practically definite proof that the boy was at first,

  as a term of endearment, called “Pennini”, which was later abbreviated

  to “Pen”. The cognomen, Hawthorne states, was a diminutive of “Apennino”,

  which was bestowed upon the boy in babyhood because he was very small,

  there being a statue in Florence of colossal size called “Apennino”.

  [See Mrs. Orr’s “Life and Letters of Robert Browning” (now online)

  for a different opinion. — A. L., 1996.]

  —

  It was in this year (1855) that “Men and Women” was published. It is difficult to understand how a collection comprising poems such as “Love among the Ruins”, “Evelyn Hope”, “Fra Lippo Lippi”, “A Toccata of Galuppi’s”, “Any Wife to any Husband”, “Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha”, “Andrea del Sarto”, “In a Balcony”, “Saul”, “A Grammarian’s Funeral”, to mention only ten now almost universally known, did not at once obtain a national popularity for the author. But lovers of literature were simply enthralled: and the two volumes had a welcome from them which was perhaps all the more ardent because of their disproportionate numbers. Ears alert to novel poetic music must have thrilled to the new strain which sounded first — “Love among the Ruins”, with its Millet-like opening —

  ”Where the quiet-coloured end of evening smiles,

  Miles and miles

  On the solitary pastures where our sheep

  Half asleep

  Tinkle homeward through the twilight, stray or stop

  As they crop —

  Was the site once of a city great and gay . . .”

  Soon after the return to Florence, which, hot as it was, was preferable in July to Rome, Mrs. Browning wrote to her frequent correspondent Miss Mitford, and mentioned that about four thousand lines of “Aurora Leigh” had been written. She added a significant passage: that her husband had not seen a single line of it up to that time — significant, as one of the several indications that the union of Browning and his wife was indeed a marriage of true minds, wherein nothing of the common bane of matrimonial life found existence. Moreover, both were artists, and, therefore, too full of respect for themselves and their art to bring in any way the undue influence of each other into play.

  By the spring of 1856, however, the first six “books” were concluded: and these, at once with humility and pride, Mrs. Browning placed in her husband’s hands. The remaining three books were written, in the summer, in John Kenyon’s London house.

  It was her best, her fullest answer to the beautiful dedicatory poem, “One Word More”, wherewith her husband, a few months earlier, sent forth his “Men and Women”, to be for ever associated with “E. B. B.”

  I.

  ”There they are, my fifty men and women

  Naming me the fifty poems finished!

  Take them, Love, the book and me together:

  Where the heart lies, let the brain lie also.

  . . . . .

  XVIII.

  This I say of me, but think of you, Love!

  This to you — yourself my moon of poets!

  Ah, but that’s the world’s side, there’s the wonder,

  Thus they see you, praise you, think they know you!

  There, in turn I stand with them and praise you —

  Out of my own self, I dare to phrase it.

  But the best is when I glide from out them,

  Cross a step or two of dubious twilight,

  Come out on the other side, the novel

  Silent silver lights and darks undreamed of,

  Where I hush and bless myself with silence.”

  The transference from Florence to London was made in May. In the summer “Aurora Leigh” was published, and met with an almost unparalleled success: even Landor, most exigent of critics, declared that he was “half drunk with it,” that it had an imagination germane to that of Shakespeare, and so forth.

  The poem was dedicated to Kenyon, and on their homeward way the Brownings were startled and shocked to hear of his sudden death. By the time they had arrived at Casa Guidi again they learned that their good friend had not forgotten them in the disposition of his large fortune. To Browning he bequeathed six thousand, to Mrs. Browning four thousand guineas. This loss was followed early in the ensuing year (1857) by the death of Mr. Barrett, steadfast to the last in his refusal of reconciliation with his daughter.

  Winters and summers passed happily in Italy — with one period of feverish anxiety, when the little boy lay for six weeks dangerously ill, nursed day and night by his father and mother alternately — with pleasant occasionings, as the companionship for a season of Nathaniel Hawthorne and his family, or of weeks spent at Siena with valued and lifelong friends, W. W. Story, the poet-sculptor, and his wife.

  So early as 1858 Mrs. Hawthorne believed she saw the heralds of death in Mrs. Browning’s excessive pallor and the hectic flush upon the cheeks, in her extreme fragility and weakness, and in her catching, fluttering breath. Even the motion of a visitor’s fan perturbed her. But “her soul was mighty, and a great love kept her on earth a season longer. She was a seraph in her flaming worship of heart.” “She lives so ardently,” adds Mrs. Hawthorne, “that her delicate earthly vesture must soon be burnt up and destroyed by her soul of pure fire.”

  Yet, notwithstanding, she still sailed the seas of life, like one of those fragile argonauts in their shells of foam and rainbow-mist which will withstand the rude surge of winds and waves. But slowly, gradually, the spirit was o’erfretting its tenement. With the waning of her strength came back the old passionate longing for rest, for quiescence from that “excitement from within”, which had been almost over vehement for her in the calm days of her unmarried life.

  It is significant that at this
time Browning’s genius was relatively dormant. Its wings were resting for the long-sustained flight of “The Ring and the Book”, and for earlier and shorter though not less royal aerial journeyings. But also, no doubt, the prolonged comparatively unproductive period of eight or nine years (1855-1864), between the publication of “Men and Women” and “Dramatis Personae”, was due in some measure to the poet’s incessant and anxious care for his wife, to the deep sorrow of witnessing her slow but visible passing away, and to the profound grief occasioned by her death. However, barrenness of imaginative creative activity can be only very relatively affirmed, even of so long a period, of years wherein were written such memorable and treasurable poems as `James Lee’s Wife’, among Browning’s writings what `Maud’ is among Lord Tennyson’s; `Gold Hair: a Legend of Pornic’; `Dis Aliter Visum’; `Abt Vogler’, the most notable production of its kind in the language; `A Death in the Desert’, that singular and impressive study; `Caliban upon Setebos’, in its strange potency of interest and stranger poetic note, absolutely unique; `Youth and Art’; `Apparent Failure’; `Prospice’, that noble lyrical defiance of death; and the supremely lofty and significant series of weighty stanzas, `Rabbi Ben Ezra’, the most quintessential of all the distinctively psychical monologues which Browning has written. It seems to me that if these two poems only, “Prospice” and “Rabbi Ben Ezra”, were to survive to the day of Macaulay’s New Zealander, the contemporaries of that meditative traveller would have sufficient to enable them to understand the great fame of the poet of “dim ancestral days”, as the more acute among them could discern something of the real Shelley, though time had preserved but the three lines —

  ”Yet now despair itself is mild,

  Even as the winds and waters are;

  I could lie down like a tired child” . . .

  something of the real Catullus, through the mists of remote antiquity, if there had not perished the single passionate cry —

  ”Lesbia illa,

  Illa Lesbia, quam Catullus unam

  Plus quam se, atque suos amavit omnes!”