Robert Browning - Delphi Poets Series

by Robert Browning

  ‘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.

  * He published also an admirable little work on the

  requirements of secondary education in France, equally

  applicable in many respects to any country and to any time.

  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 prefixe
d to twenty-five supposed letters of that poet, published by Moxon in 1852.*

  * They were discovered, not long afterwards, to be spurious,

  and the book suppressed.

  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.