Robert Browning - Delphi Poets Series

by Robert Browning

  In December 1887 he wrote ‘Rosny’, the first poem in ‘Asolando’, and that which perhaps most displays his old subtle dramatic power; it was followed by ‘Beatrice Signorini’ and ‘Flute-Music’. Of the ‘Bad Dreams’ two or three were also written in London, I think, during that winter. The ‘Ponte dell’ Angelo’ was imagined during the next autumn in Venice. ‘White Witchcraft’ had been suggested in the same summer by a letter from a friend in the Channel Islands which spoke of the number of toads to be seen there. In the spring of 1888 he began revising his works for the last, and now entirely uniform edition, which was issued in monthly volumes, and completed by the July of 1889. Important verbal corrections were made in ‘The Inn Album’, though not, I think, in many of the later poems; but that in which he found most room for improvement was, very naturally, ‘Pauline’; and he wrote concerning it to Mr. Smith the following interesting letter.

  29, De Vere Gardens, W.: Feb. 27, ‘88.

  My dear Smith, — When I received the Proofs of the 1st. vol. on Friday evening, I made sure of returning them next day — so accurately are they printed. But on looking at that unlucky ‘Pauline’, which I have not touched for half a century, a sudden impulse came over me to take the opportunity of just correcting the most obvious faults of expression, versification and construction, — letting the thoughts — such as they are — remain exactly as at first: I have only treated the imperfect expression of these just as I have now and then done for an amateur friend, if he asked me and I liked him enough to do so. Not a line is displaced, none added, none taken away. I have just sent it to the printer’s with an explanatory word: and told him that he will have less trouble with all the rest of the volumes put together than with this little portion. I expect to return all the rest to-morrow or next day.

  As for the sketch — the portrait — it admits of no very superior treatment: but, as it is the only one which makes me out youngish, — I should like to know if an artist could not strengthen the thing by a pencil touch or two in a few minutes — improve the eyes, eyebrows, and mouth somewhat. The head too wants improvement: were Pen here he could manage it all in a moment. Ever truly yours, Robert Browning.

  Any attempt at modifying the expressed thoughts of his twenty-first year would have been, as he probably felt, a futile tampering with the work of another man; his literary conscience would have forbidden this, if it had been otherwise possible. But he here proves by his own words what I have already asserted, that the power of detail correction either was, or had become by experience, very strong in him.

  The history of this summer of 1888 is partly given in a letter to Lady Martin.

  29, De Vere Gardens, W.: Aug. 12, ‘88.

  Dear Lady Martin, — The date of your kind letter, — June 18, — would affect me indeed, but for the good conscience I retain despite of appearances. So uncertain have I been as to the course we should take, — my sister and myself — when the time came for leaving town, that it seemed as if ‘next week’ might be the eventful week when all doubts would disappear — perhaps the strange cold weather and interminable rain made it hard to venture from under one’s roof even in fancy of being better lodged elsewhere. This very day week it was the old story — cold — then followed the suffocating eight or nine tropical days which forbade any more delay, and we leave to-morrow for a place called Primiero, near Feltre — where my son and his wife assure us we may be comfortably — and coolly — housed, until we can accompany them to Venice, which we may stay at for a short time. You remember our troubles at Llangollen about the purchase of a Venetian house . . . ? My son, however, nothing daunted, and acting under abler counsels than I was fortunate enough to obtain,* has obtained a still more desirable acquisition, in the shape of the well-known Rezzonico Palace (that of Pope Clement 13th) — and, I believe, is to be congratulated on his bargain. I cannot profess the same interest in this as in the earlier object of his ambition, but am quite satisfied by the evident satisfaction of the ‘young people’. So, — by the old law of compensation, — while we may expect pleasant days abroad — our chance is gone of once again enjoying your company in your own lovely Vale of Llangollen; — had we not been pulled otherwise by the inducements we could not resist, — another term of delightful weeks — each tipped with a sweet starry Sunday at the little church leading to the House Beautiful where we took our rest of an evening spent always memorably — this might have been our fortunate lot once again! As it is, perhaps we need more energetic treatment than we should get with you — for both of us are more oppressed than ever by the exigencies of the lengthy season, and require still more bracing air than the gently lulling temperature of Wales. May it be doing you, and dear Sir Theodore, all the good you deserve — throwing in the share due to us, who must forego it! With all love from us both, ever affectionately yours Robert Browning.

  * Those of Mr. Alexander Malcolm.

  He did start for Italy on the following day, but had become so ill, that he was on the point of postponing his departure. He suffered throughout the journey as he had never suffered on any journey before; and during his first few days at Primiero, could only lead the life of an invalid. He rallied, however, as usual, under the potent effects of quiet, fresh air, and sunshine; and fully recovered his normal state before proceeding to Venice, where the continued sense of physical health combined with many extraneous circumstances to convert his proposed short stay into a long one. A letter from the mountains, addressed to a lady who had never been abroad, and to whom he sometimes wrote with more descriptive detail than to other friends, gives a touching glimpse of his fresh delight in the beauties of nature, and his tender constant sympathy with the animal creation.

  Primiero: Sept. 7, ‘88.

  . . . . .

  ‘The weather continues exquisitely temperate, yet sunny, ever since the clearing thunderstorm of which I must have told you in my last. It is, I am more and more confirmed in believing, the most beautiful place I was ever resident in: far more so than Gressoney or even St.-Pierre de Chartreuse. You would indeed delight in seeing the magnificence of the mountains, — the range on either side, which morning and evening, in turn, transmute literally to gold, — I mean what I say. Their utterly bare ridges of peaks and crags of all shape, quite naked of verdure, glow like yellow ore; and, at times, there is a silver change, as the sun prevails or not.

  ‘The valley is one green luxuriance on all sides; Indian corn, with beans, gourds, and even cabbages, filling up the interstices; and the flowers, though not presenting any novelty to my uninstructed eyes, yet surely more large and purely developed than I remember to have seen elsewhere. For instance, the tiger-lilies in the garden here must be above ten feet high, every bloom faultless, and, what strikes me as peculiar, every leaf on the stalk from bottom to top as perfect as if no insect existed to spoil them by a notch or speck. . . .

  ‘. . . Did I tell you we had a little captive fox, — the most engaging of little vixens? To my great joy she has broken her chain and escaped, never to be recaptured, I trust. The original wild and untameable nature was to be plainly discerned even in this early stage of the whelp’s life: she dug herself, with such baby feet, a huge hole, the use of which was evident, when, one day, she pounced thence on a stray turkey — allured within reach by the fragments of fox’s breakfast, — the intruder escaping with the loss of his tail. The creature came back one night to explore the old place of captivity, — ate some food and retired. For myself, — I continue absolutely well: I do not walk much, but for more than amends, am in the open air all day long.’

  No less striking is a short extract from a letter written in Venice to the same friend, Miss Keep.

  Ca’ Alvise: Oct. 16, ‘88.

  ‘Every morning at six, I see the sun rise; far more wonderfully, to my mind, than his famous setting, which everybody glorifies. My bedroom window commands a perfect view: the still, grey lagune, the few seagulls flying, the islet of S. Giorgio in deep shadow, and the clouds in a long purple rack, behind
which a sort of spirit of rose burns up till presently all the rims are on fire with gold, and last of all the orb sends before it a long column of its own essence apparently: so my day begins.’

  We feel, as we read these late, and even later words, that the lyric imagination was renewing itself in the incipient dissolution of other powers. It is the Browning of ‘Pippa Passes’ who speaks in them.

  He suffered less on the whole during the winter of 1888-9. It was already advanced when he returned to England; and the attacks of cold and asthma were either shorter or less frequent. He still maintained throughout the season his old social routine, not omitting his yearly visit, on the anniversary of Waterloo, to Lord Albemarle, its last surviving veteran. He went for some days to Oxford during the commemoration week, and had for the first, as also last time, the pleasure of Dr. Jowett’s almost exclusive society at his beloved Balliol College. He proceeded with his new volume of poems. A short letter written to Professor Knight, June 16, and of which the occasion speaks for itself, fitly closes the labours of his life; for it states his view of the position and function of poetry, in one brief phrase, which might form the text to an exhaustive treatise upon them.

  29, De Vere Gardens, W.: June 16, 1889.

  My dear Professor Knight, — I am delighted to hear that there is a likelihood of your establishing yourself in Glasgow, and illustrating Literature as happily as you have expounded Philosophy at St. Andrews. It is certainly the right order of things: Philosophy first, and Poetry, which is its highest outcome, afterward — and much harm has been done by reversing the natural process. How capable you are of doing justice to the highest philosophy embodied in poetry, your various studies of Wordsworth prove abundantly; and for the sake of both Literature and Philosophy I wish you success with all my heart.

  Believe me, dear Professor Knight, yours very truly, Robert Browning.

  But he experienced, when the time came, more than his habitual disinclination for leaving home. A distinct shrinking from the fatigue of going to Italy now added itself to it; for he had suffered when travelling back in the previous winter, almost as much as on the outward journey, though he attributed the distress to a different cause: his nerves were, he thought, shaken by the wearing discomforts incidental on a broken tooth. He was for the first time painfully sensitive to the vibration of the train. He had told his friends, both in Venice and London, that so far as he was able to determine, he would never return to Italy. But it was necessary he should go somewhere, and he had no alternative plan. For a short time in this last summer he entertained the idea of a visit to Scotland; it had indeed definitely shaped itself in his mind; but an incident, trivial in itself, though he did not think it so, destroyed the first scheme, and it was then practically too late to form another. During the second week in August the weather broke. There could no longer be any question of the northward journey without even a fixed end in view. His son and daughter had taken possession of their new home, the Palazzo Rezzonico, and were anxious to see him and Miss Browning there; their wishes naturally had weight. The casting vote in favour of Venice was given by a letter from Mrs. Bronson, proposing Asolo as the intermediate stage. She had fitted up for herself a little summer retreat there, and promised that her friends should, if they joined her, be also comfortably installed. The journey was this time propitious. It was performed without imprudent haste, and Mr. Browning reached Asolo unfatigued and to all appearance well.

  He saw this, his first love among Italian cities, at a season of the year more favourable to its beauty than even that of his first visit; yet he must himself have been surprised by the new rapture of admiration which it created in him, and which seemed to grow with his lengthened stay. This state of mind was the more striking, that new symptoms of his physical decline were now becoming apparent, and were in themselves of a depressing kind. He wrote to a friend in England, that the atmosphere of Asolo, far from being oppressive, produced in him all the effects of mountain air, and he was conscious of difficulty of breathing whenever he walked up hill. He also suffered, as the season advanced, great inconvenience from cold. The rooms occupied by himself and his sister were both unprovided with fireplaces; and though the daily dinner with Mrs. Bronson obviated the discomfort of the evenings, there remained still too many hours of the autumnal day in which the impossibility of heating their own little apartment must have made itself unpleasantly felt. The latter drawback would have been averted by the fulfilment of Mr. Browning’s first plan, to be in Venice by the beginning of October, and return to the comforts of his own home before the winter had quite set in; but one slight motive for delay succeeded another, till at last a more serious project introduced sufficient ground of detention. He seemed possessed by a strange buoyancy — an almost feverish joy in life, which blunted all sensations of physical distress, or helped him to misinterpret them. When warned against the imprudence of remaining where he knew he suffered from cold, and believed, rightly or wrongly, that his asthmatic tendencies were increased, he would reply that he was growing acclimatized — that he was quite well. And, in a fitful or superficial sense, he must have been so.

  His letters of that period are one continuous picture, glowing with his impressions of the things which they describe. The same words will repeat themselves as the same subject presents itself to his pen; but the impulse to iteration scarcely ever affects us as mechanical. It seems always a fresh response to some new stimulus to thought or feeling, which he has received. These reach him from every side. It is not only the Asolo of this peaceful later time which has opened before him, but the Asolo of ‘Pippa Passes’ and ‘Sordello’; that which first stamped itself on his imagination in the echoes of the Court life of Queen Catharine,* and of the barbaric wars of the Eccelini. Some of his letters dwell especially on these early historical associations: on the strange sense of reopening the ancient chronicle which he had so deeply studied fifty years before. The very phraseology of the old Italian text, which I am certain he had never glanced at from that distant time, is audible in an account of the massacre of San Zenone, the scene of which he has been visiting. To the same correspondent he says that his two hours’ drive to Asolo ‘seemed to be a dream;’ and again, after describing, or, as he thinks, only trying to describe some beautiful feature of the place, ‘but it is indescribable!’

  * Catharine Cornaro, the dethroned queen of Cyprus.

  A letter addressed to Mrs. FitzGerald, October 8, 1889, is in part a fitting sequel to that which he had written to her from the same spot, eleven years before.

  ‘. . . Fortunately there is little changed here: my old Albergo, — ruinous with earthquake — is down and done with — but few novelties are observable — except the regrettable one that the silk industry has been transported elsewhere — to Cornuda and other places nearer the main railway. No more Pippas — at least of the silk-winding sort!

  ‘But the pretty type is far from extinct.

  ‘Autumn is beginning to paint the foliage, but thin it as well; and the sea of fertility all round our height, which a month ago showed pomegranates and figs and chestnuts, — walnuts and apples all rioting together in full glory, — all this is daily disappearing. I say nothing of the olive and the vine. I find the Turret rather the worse for careful weeding — the hawks which used to build there have been “shot for food” — and the echo is sadly curtailed of its replies; still, things are the same in the main. Shall I ever see them again, when — as I suppose — we leave for Venice in a fortnight? . . .’

  In the midst of this imaginative delight he carried into his walks the old keen habits of observation. He would peer into the hedges for what living things were to be found there. He would whistle softly to the lizards basking on the low walls which border the roads, to try his old power of attracting them.

  On the 15th of October he wrote to Mrs. Skirrow, after some preliminary description:

  Then — such a view over the whole Lombard plain; not a site in view, or approximate view at least, without it
s story. Autumn is now painting all the abundance of verdure, — figs, pomegranates, chestnuts, and vines, and I don’t know what else, — all in a wonderful confusion, — and now glowing with all the colours of the rainbow. Some weeks back, the little town was glorified by the visit of a decent theatrical troop who played in a theatre inside the old palace of Queen Catharine Cornaro — utilized also as a prison in which I am informed are at present full five if not six malefactors guilty of stealing grapes, and the like enormities. Well, the troop played for a fortnight together exceedingly well — high tragedy and low comedy — and the stage-box which I occupied cost 16 francs. The theatre had been out of use for six years, for we are out of the way and only a baiting-place for a company pushing on to Venice. In fine, we shall stay here probably for a week or more, — and then proceed to Pen, at the Rezzonico; a month there, and then homewards! . . .

  I delight in finding that the beloved Husband and precious friend manages to do without the old yoke about his neck, and enjoys himself as never anybody had a better right to do. I continue to congratulate him on his emancipation and ourselves on a more frequent enjoyment of his company in consequence.* Give him my true love; take mine, dearest friend, — and my sister’s love to you both goes with it. Ever affectionately yours Robert Browning.