Robert Browning - Delphi Poets Series

by Robert Browning

  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 volume is entitled ‘Rhymed Plea for Tolerance’ (1833),

  and contains a reference to Mr. Kenyon’s schooldays,

  and to the classic fights which Mr. Browning had instituted.

  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 Pr
ofessor 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.’

  * The term Gothic has been applied to Mr. Browning’s work, I

  believe, by Mr. James Thomson, in writing of ‘The Ring and

  the Book’, and I do not like to use it without saying so.

  But it is one of those which must have spontaneously

  suggested themselves to many other of Mr. Browning’s

  readers.

  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.

  * These words, and a subsequent paragraph, are quoted from

  Mr. Gosse’s ‘Personalia’.

  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.)

  Ho! everyone that by the nose is led, />
  Automatons of which the world is full,

  Ye myriad bodies, each without a head,

  That dangle from a critic’s brainless skull,

  Come, hearken to a deep discovery made,

  A mighty truth now wondrously displayed.

  A black squat beetle, vigorous for his size,

  Pushing tail-first by every road that’s wrong

  The dung-ball of his dirty thoughts along

  His tiny sphere of grovelling sympathies —

  Has knocked himself full-butt, with blundering trouble,

  Against a mountain he can neither double

  Nor ever hope to scale. So like a free,

  Pert, self-conceited scarabaeus, he

  Takes it into his horny head to swear

  There’s no such thing as any mountain there.

  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.