Complete Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning

by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

  “Read ‘Paracelsus,’ a work of great daring, starred with poetry of thought, feeling, diction, but occasionally obscure. The writer can scarcely fail to be a leading spirit of the time.”

  On New Year’s Eve Mr. Macready invited a little house party, among whom were Forster and Browning. “Mr. Browning was very popular with the whole party,” writes Mr. Macready in his journal; “his simple and enthusiastic manner engaged attention and won golden opinions from all present; he looks and speaks more like a youthful poet than any man I ever saw.”

  Browning’s personal appearance, “slim, and dark, and very handsome,” as Mary Cowden Clarke said, is pictured by many of his friends of that time. “As a young man,” writes William Sharp, “he seems to have had a certain ivory delicacy of coloring ... and he appeared taller than he really was, partly because of his rare grace of movement, and partly from a characteristic high poise of the head when listening intently to music or conversation.... His hair was so beautiful in its heavy sculpturesque waves as to attract frequent notice. Another, and more subtle personal charm, was his voice, then with a rare, flute-like tone, clear, sweet, and resonant.”

  Macready was not only a notable figure on the stage at this period, but he was also (what every great actor must be) a man of thought, intense sensibility, and wide culture. Soon after Macready had appeared in Talfourd’s “Ion” (the première being on the playwright’s birthday), Talfourd gave a supper at his house, at which Browning for the first time met Wordsworth and Landor. Macready himself sat between these two illustrious poets, with Browning opposite to him. The guests included Ellen Tree, Miss Mitford, and Forster. Macready, recording this night in his diary, writes of “Wordsworth who pinned me.” Landor, it seems, talked of constructing drama, and said he “had not the faculty,” that he “could only set persons to talking; all the rest was chance.” But an ever remembered moment came for the young poet when the host proposed a toast to the author of “Paracelsus,” and Wordsworth, rising, said: “I am proud to drink to your health, Mr. Browning,” and Landor bowed with his inimitable, courteous grace, raising his glass to his lips. For some years, whenever Wordsworth visited London, Forster invited Browning to meet him. The younger poet was never an enthusiast in his mild friendship for the elder, although in after years (1875) he replied to a question by Rev. A. B. Grosart, the editor of Wordsworth’s works, that while in hasty youth he did “presume to use the great and venerated personality of Wordsworth as a sort of painter’s model,” he intended in “The Lost Leader” no portrait of the entire man. While Wordsworth’s political attitude did not please the young disciple of Shelley, for Landor he conceived the most profound admiration and sympathetic affection. It was a striking sequel to this youthful attraction that in Landor’s desolate old age it should be Browning who tenderly cared for him, and surrounded his last days with unfailing comfort and solicitude.

  At this memorable supper, just as Browning was about to take his leave, Macready laid his hand on the young man’s shoulder, saying earnestly: “Write a play for me, and keep me from going to America.” The thought appealed to the poet, who replied: “Shall it be historical and English? What do you say to ‘Strafford’ for a subject?” Forster was then bringing out his biography of Strafford, on which Browning had assisted, so that the theme had already engaged his imagination. A few days after the supper Macready records in his diary receiving a note from Browning and adds: “What can I say upon it? It was a tribute which remunerated me for the annoyances and cares of years; it was one of the very highest, may I not say the highest, honor I have through life received.”

  A certain temperamental sympathy between the two men is evident, though Macready sounded no such fathomless depths as lay, however unsuspected, in Browning; but Macready gives many indications of poetic sympathies, as, for instance, when he records in his diary how he had been looking through Coleridge’s translation of Wallenstein, “abounding with noble passages and beautiful scenes,” to see if it would lend itself to stage representation.

  On November 19 of this autumn Macready notes in his journal that Browning came that night to bring his tragedy of “Strafford,” of which the fourth act was incomplete. “I requested him to write in the plot of what was deficient,” says Macready, and drove to the Garrick Club while Browning wrote out this story. Later, there was a morning call from Browning, who gave him an interesting old print of Richard, from some tapestry, and they talked of “La Vallière.” All the time we get glimpses of an interesting circle: Bulwer and Forster call, and they discuss Cromwell; Bulwer’s play of “Virginius” is in rehearsal; Macready acts Cardinal Wolsey; there is a dinner at Lady Blessington’s, where are met Lord Canterbury, Count D’Orsay, Bulwer, Trelawney, and Proctor; there is a call on Miss Martineau, and meetings with Thackeray and Dickens; Kenyon appears in the intersecting circles; Marston (the father of the blind poet) writes his play, “The Patrician’s Daughter”; Mr. Longfellow, “a Professor at one of the U. S. Universities,” appears on the scene, and there is a dinner at which “Mr. and Mrs. N. P. Willis sat next to Longfellow.” On a night when Browning came with some alterations for “Strafford,” a stranger called, “saying he was a Greek, a great lover of the drama; I introduced Browning to him as a great tragic poet,” records Macready, “and the youth wrote down his name, telling us he was setting off for Athens directly.”

  The rehearsals of “Strafford” came on, but Macready seems already to have had misgivings. “In Shakespeare,” he writes, “the great poet has only introduced such events as act on the individuals concerned; but in Browning’s play we have a long scene of passion — upon what? A plan destroyed, a parliament dissolved....” It is easy to see how Browningesque this was; for to the poet no events of the objective life were so real and significant as those of the purely mental drama of thought, feeling, and purpose. The rehearsals were, however, gratifying to the author, it seems, for Macready records in his diary (that recurs like the chorus in a Greek tragedy) that he was happy “with the extreme delight Browning testified at the rehearsal of my part, which he said to him was a full recompense for having written the play, as he had seen his utmost hopes of character perfectly embodied.” The play was performed at the Covent Garden Theater on the night of May 3, 1837.

  Both Edmund Gosse and William Sharp deny that Browning’s plays failed on the stage; at all events, with each attempt there were untoward circumstances which alone would have contributed to or even doomed a play to a short tenure.

  In 1886 “Strafford” was produced in London under the auspices of the Browning Society, and the real power of the play surprised as well as deeply impressed the audiences who saw it. But “Pauline,” “Paracelsus,” and “Strafford” all have a peculiar element of reminiscent importance, if it may be so termed, in that they were the forerunners, the indications of the great work to come.

  There is no dramatic poem of Browning’s that has not passages of superb acting effects, as well as psychological fascinations for the thinker; and the future years were to touch him with new power to produce work whose dramatic power lives in imperishable significance. “Strafford” had a run of only five nights at this first time of its production; Macready received and accepted an offer to go to America, and other things happened. Browning became absorbed in his “Sordello,” and suddenly, on Good Friday of 1838, he sailed for Venice, “intending to finish my poem among the scenes it describes,” he wrote to John Robertson, who had been introduced to Browning by Miss Martineau. On a sailing ship, bound for Trieste, the poet found himself the only passenger. It was on this voyage, while between Gibraltar and Naples, that he wrote “How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix.” It was written on deck, penciled on the fly-leaf of Bartoli’s De’ Simboli trasportati al Morale. When Dr. Corson first visited Browning in 1881, in his London home in Warwick Crescent, Browning showed his guest this identical copy of the book, with the penciled poem on the fly-leaves, of which Dr. Corson said, in a private letter to a friend:

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bsp; “One book in the library I was particularly interested in, — Bartoli’s Simboli, or, rather, in what the poet had written in pencil on its fly-leaves, front and back, namely, ‘How they brought the good news from Ghent to Aix.’”

  Dr. Corson added that he had been so often asked as to what this “good news” was, that he put the question to Mr. Browning, who replied:

  “‘I don’t remember whether I had in my mind any in particular, when I wrote the poem’; and then, after a pause,” continued Dr. Corson, “he said, with a dash of expression characteristic of him, ‘Of course, very important news were carried between those two cities during that period.’”

  In Mrs. Orr’s biography of Browning she quotes a long letter written by him to Miss Haworth, in the late summer of 1838, after his return from this Italian trip, in which he says:

  “You will see ‘Sordello’ in a trice, if the fagging fit holds. I did not write six lines while absent (except a scene in a play, jotted down as we sailed through the straits of Gibraltar), but I did hammer out some four, two of which are addressed to you,... I saw the most gorgeous and lavish sunset in the world.... I went to Trieste, then to Venice, then through Treviso, and Bassano to the mountains, delicious Asolo, all my places and castles you will see. Then to Vicenza, Padua, and Venice again. Then to Verona, Trent, Innspruck (the Tyrol), Munich, Salzburg, Frankfort and Mayence; down the Rhine to Cologne, then to Aix-le-Chapelle, Liège, and Antwerp; then home.... I saw very few Italians, ‘to know,’ that is. Those I did see I liked....”

  It is related that the captain of the ship became so much attached to Browning that he offered him a free passage to Constantinople; and that his friendly attraction to his youthful passenger was such that on returning to England he brought to the poet’s sister a gift of six bottles of attar of roses. The poems of “Pippa Passes” and “In a Gondola” may be directly traced to this visit, and Browning seemed so invigorated by it that his imagination was aflame with a multitude of ideas at once.

  Meanwhile “Paracelsus” was winning increasing appreciation. The poet did not escape the usual sweeping conclusion generally put forth regarding any unusual work, that the author has made extensive studies for it, — as if ideas and imagination drew their inspiration from the outer world, and were solely to be appraised, as to their results, by the capacity for cramming. So much cramming, so much genius! He who thus mistakes inspiration for industry certainly proves how very remote is his mind from the former. With this marvelous work by a young man of twenty-three the usual literary legends were set afloat, like thistledown in the air, which seem to have floated and alighted everywhere, and which now, more than seventy-five years later, are apparently still floating and alighting on the pens of various writers, to the effect that “Paracelsus” is the result of “vast research among contemporary records,” till the poem added another to the Seven Labors of Hercules. As a matter of fact, and as has already been noted, Browning had merely browsed about his father’s library.

  Dr. Berdoe points out that the real “Paracelsus” cannot be understood without considerable excursions into the occult sciences, and he is quite right as to the illumination these provide, in proportionate degree as they are acquired by the reader; as a matter of course they enlarge his horizon, and offer him clues to unsuspected labyrinths; and so fine and complete is Dr. Berdoe’s own commentary on “Paracelsus” that it might not unduly be held as supplementary to the reader’s entire enjoyment of the poem. Dr. Berdoe notes that the Bishop of Spanheim, who was the instructor of Paracelsus, defined “divine magic,” as another name for alchemy, “and lays down the great doctrine of all medieval occultism, as of all modern theosophy, — of a soul-power equally operative in the material and the immaterial, in nature and in the consciousness of man.” The sympathetic reader of Browning’s “Paracelsus” will realize, however, that the drama he presents is spiritual, rather than occult. It is not the search for the possible mysteries, or achievements of the crucible. It is the adventure of the soul, not the penetration into the secrets of unknown elementals.

  In the autumn of 1835 the Browning family removed from Camberwell to Hatcham. They bestowed themselves in a spacious, delightful old house, with “long, low rooms,” wherein the household gods, inclusive of the six thousand books of the elder Browning’s treasured library, found abundant accommodation; and the outlook on the Surrey hills gratified them all. During these years we catch a few glimpses of the poet’s only sister, Sarianna, who was two years younger than her brother, and quite as fond of listening to the conversation of an uncle, William Shergold Browning, who had removed to Paris. Here he was connected with the Rothschild banking house, and had achieved some distinction as the author of a “History of the Huguenots.” He also wrote two historical novels, entitled “Hoel Mar en Morven” and “Provost of Paris,” and compiled one of those harmless volumes entitled “Leisure Hours.” It was this uncle who had brought about the introduction of his nephew and Marquis Amédée de Ripert-Monclar, whose uncle, the Marquis de Fortia, a member of the Institut, was a special friend of William Shergold Browning. In later years a grandson of the Paris Browning, after graduating at Lincoln College, became Crown prosecutor in New South Wales. He is known as Robert Jardine Browning, and he was on terms of intimacy with his cousins, Robert and Sarianna, whom he often visited.

  ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING

  From a drawing made by Field Talfourd, in Rome, 1855

  The family friendship with Carlyle was a source of great pleasure to Mrs. Browning, the poet’s mother, and there is on record a night when Carlyle and his brother dined with the Brownings at Hatcham. Another family friend and habitué was the Rev. Archer Gurney, who at a later time became Chaplain to the British Embassy in Paris. Mr. Gurney was a writer of poems and plays, lyrics and dramatic verse, and a volume of his work entitled “Fra Cipollo and Other Poems” was published, from which Browning drew his motto for “Colombe’s Birthday.” Mr. Gurney was deeply interested in young Browning’s poetry, and there is a nebulous trace of his having something to do with the publication of “Bells and Pomegranates.” Another friend of the poet was Christopher Dowson, who married the sister of Alfred Domett; at their homes, Albion Terrace, and their summer cottage in Epping Forest, Browning was a frequent visitor. Dowson died early; but Field Talfourd (a brother of the author of “Ion” and the artist who made those crayon portraits of Browning and his wife, in the winter of 1859, in Rome), Joseph Arnould, and Alfred Domett, with one or two other young men, comprised the poet’s more intimate circle at this time. Arnould and Domett were both studying for the Bar; Arnould had gained the Newdigate in 1834, and had won great applause by his recital (in the Sheldonian Theater) of his “Hospice of St. Bernard.” Later he was offered the editorship of the Daily News, founded by Forster and Dickens, but he kept true to his legal studies and in time became the Judge of the High Court at Bombay, and was knighted by the Crown.

  There was a dinner given by Macready at which Browning, Carlyle, and Miss Martineau were guests, and later a dinner at the Carlyles’ where Browning met a son of Burns “who sang some of his father’s songs.” To a friend Browning wrote: “I dined with dear Carlyle and his wife (catch me calling people ‘dear’ in a hurry) yesterday. I don’t know any people like them.”

  Browning passed a day with Miss Martineau at Ascot, and again visited her in Elstree, where she was staying with the Macreadys. She greatly admired “Paracelsus,” and spoke of her first acquaintance with his poetry as a “wonderful event.” He dined with her at her home in Westminster, and there met John Robertson, the assistant editor of the Westminster Review, to which Miss Martineau was a valued contributor. Henry Chorley, a musical critic of the day, was another guest that night, and soon after Browning dined with him “in his bachellor abode,” the other guests being Arnould, Domett, and Bryan Proctor; later, at a musicale given by Chorley, Browning met Charlotte Cushman and Adelaide Kemble. Chorley drew around him the best musicians of the time: Mendelssohn, Moscheles, Lisz
t, David, and other great composers were often rendered in his chambers. Proctor was then living in Harley Street, and his house was a center for the literary folk of the day.

  George Eliot speaks of the indifference with which we gaze at our unintroduced neighbor, “while Destiny stands by, sarcastic, with our dramatis personæ folded in her hands.” It was such an hour of destiny as this when, at a dinner given by Sergeant Talfourd, at his home (No. 56) in Russell Square, Browning first met John Kenyon. Our great events mostly come to us like gods in disguise, and this evening was no exception. Unknown and undreamed of, the young poet had come to one of those partings of the ways which are only recognized in the perspective of time. Browning’s life had been curiously free from any romance beyond that with the muses. The one woman with whom he had seemed most intimate, Miss Fanny Haworth, was eleven years his senior, and their intercourse, both conversationally and in letters, had been as impersonal as literature itself. She was a writer of stories and verse, and had celebrated her young friend in two sonnets. This friendship was one of literary attractions alone, and the poet had apparently devoted all his romance to poetry rather than demanded it in life. But now, golden doors were to open.

  At this dinner at Mr. Talfourd’s, John Kenyon came over to the poet, after they had left the dining-room, and inquired if he were not the son of his old school-fellow, Robert Browning. Finding this surmise to be true, he became greatly attached to him. Mr. Kenyon had lost his wife some time previously; he had no children, and he was a prominent and favorite figure in London society. Southey said of Kenyon that he was “one of the best and pleasantest of men, whom every one likes better the longer he is known,” and Kenyon, declaring that Browning “deserved to be a poet, being one in heart and life,” offered to him his “best and most precious gift,” — that of an introduction to his second cousin, Elizabeth Barrett.