Robert Browning - Delphi Poets Series

by Robert Browning

  —

  * Mrs. Fraser Corkran, who saw much of the poet’s father

  during his residence in Paris, has spoken to me of his extraordinary

  analytical faculty in the elucidation of complex criminal cases.

  It was once said of him that his detective faculty amounted to genius.

  This is a significant trait in the father of the author

  of “The Ring and the Book”.

  —

  He had three children himself — Robert, born May 7th, 1812, a daughter named Sarianna, after her mother, and Clara. His wife was a woman of singular beauty of nature, with a depth of religious feeling saved from narrowness of scope only by a rare serenity and a fathomless charity. Her son’s loving admiration of her was almost a passion: even late in life he rarely spoke of her without tears coming to his eyes. She was, moreover, of an intellectual bent of mind, and with an artistic bias having its readiest fulfilment in music, and, to some extent, in poetry. In the latter she inclined to the Romanticists: her husband always maintained the supremacy of Pope. He looked with much dubiety upon his son’s early writings, “Pauline” and “Paracelsus”; “Sordello”, though he found it beyond either his artistic or his mental apprehension, he forgave, because it was written in rhymed couplets; the maturer works he regarded with sympathy and pride, with a vague admiration which passed into a clearer understanding only when his long life was drawing near its close.

  Of his children’s company he never tired, even when they were scarce out of babyhood. He was fond of taking the little Robert in his arms, and walking to and fro with him in the dusk in “the library”, soothing the child to sleep by singing to him snatches of Anacreon in the original, to a favourite old tune of his, “A Cottage in a Wood”. Readers of “Asolando” will remember the allusions in that volume to “my father who was a scholar and knew Greek.” A week or two before his death Browning told an American friend, Mrs. Corson, in reply to a statement of hers that no one could accuse him of letting his talents lie idle: “It would have been quite unpardonable in my case not to have done my best. My dear father put me in a condition most favourable for the best work I was capable of. When I think of the many authors who have had to fight their way through all sorts of difficulties, I have no reason to be proud of my achievements. My good father sacrificed a fortune to his convictions. He could not bear with slavery, and left India and accepted a humble bank-office in London. He secured for me all the ease and comfort that a literary man needs to do good work. It would have been shameful if I had not done my best to realise his expectations of me.”*

  —

  * `India’ is a slip on the part either of Browning or of Mrs. Corson.

  The poet’s father was never in India. He was quite a youth

  when he went to his mother’s sugar-plantation at St. Kitts,

  in the West Indies.

  —

  The home of Mr. Browning was, as already stated, in Camberwell, a suburb then of less easy access than now, and where there were green trees, and groves, and enticing rural perspectives into “real” country, yet withal not without some suggestion of the metropolitan air.

  ”The old trees

  Which grew by our youth’s home — the waving mass

  Of climbing plants, heavy with bloom and dew —

  The morning swallows with their songs like words —

  All these seem clear. . . .

  . . . most distinct amid

  The fever and the stir of after years.”

  (`Pauline’.)

  Another great writer of our time was born in the same parish: and those who would know Herne Hill and the neighbourhood as it was in Browning’s youth will find an enthusiastic guide in the author of `Praeterita’.

  Browning’s childhood was a happy one. Indeed, if the poet had been able to teach in song only what he had learnt in suffering, the larger part of his verse would be singularly barren of interest. From first to last everything went well with him, with the exception of a single profound grief. This must be borne in mind by those who would estimate aright the genius of Robert Browning. It would be affectation or folly to deny that his splendid physique — a paternal inheritance, for his father died at the age of eighty-four, without having ever endured a day’s illness — and the exceptionally fortunate circumstances which were his throughout life, had something to do with that superb faith of his which finds concentrated expression in the lines in Pippa’s song — “God’s in His Heaven, All’s right with the world!”

  It is difficult for a happy man with an imperturbable digestion to be a pessimist. He is always inclined to give Nature the benefit of the doubt. His favourite term for this mental complaisance is “catholicity of faith”, or, it may be, “a divine hope”. The less fortunate brethren bewail the laws of Nature, and doubt a future readjustment, because of stomachs chronically out of order. An eminent author with a weak digestion wrote to me recently animadverting on what he calls Browning’s insanity of optimism: it required no personal acquaintanceship to discern the dyspeptic well-spring of this utterance. All this may be admitted lightly without carrying the physiological argument to extremes. A man may have a liberal hope for himself and for humanity, although his dinner be habitually a martyrdom. After all, we are only dictated to by our bodies: we have not perforce to obey them. A bitter wit once remarked that the soul, if it were ever discovered, would be found embodied in the gastric juice. He was not altogether a fool, this man who had learnt in suffering what he taught in epigram; yet was he wide of the mark.

  As a very young child Browning was keenly susceptible to music. One afternoon his mother was playing in the twilight to herself. She was startled to hear a sound behind her. Glancing round, she beheld a little white figure distinct against an oak bookcase, and could just discern two large wistful eyes looking earnestly at her. The next moment the child had sprung into her arms, sobbing passionately at he knew not what, but, as his paroxysm of emotion subsided, whispering over and over, with shy urgency, “Play! play!”

  It is strange that among all his father’s collection of drawings and engravings nothing had such fascination for him as an engraving of a picture of Andromeda and Perseus by Caravaggio. The story of the innocent victim and the divine deliverer was one of which in his boyhood he never tired of hearing: and as he grew older the charm of its pictorial presentment had for him a deeper and more complex significance. We have it on the authority of a friend that Browning had this engraving always before his eyes as he wrote his earlier poems. He has given beautiful commemoration to his feeling for it in “Pauline”: —

  ”Andromeda!

  And she is with me — years roll, I shall change,

  But change can touch her not — so beautiful

  With her dark eyes, earnest and still, and hair

  Lifted and spread by the salt-sweeping breeze;

  And one red beam, all the storm leaves in heaven,

  Resting upon her eyes and face and hair,

  As she awaits the snake on the wet beach,

  By the dark rock, and the white wave just breaking

  At her feet; quite naked and alone, — a thing

  You doubt not, nor fear for, secure that God

  Will come in thunder from the stars to save her.”

  One of his own early recollections was that of sitting on his father’s knees in the library, and listening with enthralled attention to the Tale of Troy, with marvellous illustrations among the glowing coals in the fireplace; with, below all, the vaguely heard accompaniment — from the neighbouring room where Mrs. Browning sat “in her chief happiness, her hour of darkness and solitude and music” — of a wild Gaelic lament, with its insistent falling cadences. A story concerning his poetic precocity has been circulated, but is not worth repeating. Most children love jingling rhymes, and one need not be a born genius to improvise a rhyming couplet on an occasion.

  It is quite certain that in nothing in these early poemicules, in such at least as have be
en preserved without the poet’s knowledge and against his will, is there anything of genuine promise. Hundreds of youngsters have written as good, or better, Odes to the Moon, Stanzas on a Favourite Canary, Lines on a Butterfly. What is much more to the point is, that at the age of eight he was able not only to read, but to take delight in Pope’s translation of Homer. He used to go about declaiming certain couplets with an air of intense earnestness highly diverting to those who overheard him.

  About this time also he began to translate the simpler odes of Horace. One of these (viii. Bk. II.) long afterwards suggested to him the theme of his “Instans Tyrannus”. It has been put on record that his sister remembers him, as a very little boy, walking round and round the dining-room table, and spanning out the scansion of his verses with his hand on the smooth mahogany. He was scarce more than a child when, one Guy Fawkes’ day, he heard a woman singing an unfamiliar song, whose burden was, “Following the Queen of the Gipsies, O!” This refrain haunted him often in the after years. That beautiful fantastic romance, “The Flight of the Duchess”, was born out of an insistent memory of this woman’s snatch of song, heard in childhood. He was ten when, after several `passions malheureuses’, this precocious Lothario plunged into a love affair whose intensity was only equalled by its hopelessness. A trifle of fifteen years’ seniority and a husband complicated matters, but it was not till after the reckless expenditure of a Horatian ode upon an unclassical mistress that he gave up hope. The outcome of this was what the elder Browning regarded as a startling effusion of much Byronic verse. The young Robert yearned for wastes of ocean and illimitable sands, for dark eyes and burning caresses, for despair that nothing could quench but the silent grave, and, in particular, for hollow mocking laughter. His father looked about for a suitable school, and decided to entrust the boy’s further education to Mr. Ready, of Peckham.

  Here he remained till he was fourteen. But already he knew the dominion of dreams. His chief enjoyment, on holiday afternoons, was to gain an unfrequented spot, where three huge elms re-echoed the tones of incoherent human music borne thitherward by the west winds across the wastes of London. Here he loved to lie and dream. Alas, those elms, that high remote coign, have long since passed to the “hidden way” whither the snows of yester year have vanished. He would lie for hours looking upon distant London — a golden city of the west literally enough, oftentimes, when the sunlight came streaming in long shafts from behind the towers of Westminster and flashed upon the gold cross of St. Paul’s. The coming and going of the cloud-shadows, the sweeping of sudden rains, the dull silvern light emanating from the haze of mist shrouding the vast city, with the added transitory gleam of troubled waters, the drifting of fogs, at that distance seeming like gigantic veils constantly being moved forward and then slowly withdrawn, as though some sinister creature of the atmosphere were casting a net among all the dross and debris of human life for fantastic sustenance of its own — all this endless, ever-changing, always novel phantasmagoria had for him an extraordinary fascination. One of the memorable nights of his boyhood was an eve when he found his way, not without perturbation of spirit because of the unfamiliar solitary dark, to his loved elms. There, for the first time, he beheld London by night. It seemed to him then more wonderful and appalling than all the host of stars. There was something ominous in that heavy pulsating breath: visible, in a waning and waxing of the tremulous, ruddy glow above the black enmassed leagues of masonry; audible, in the low inarticulate moaning borne eastward across the crests of Norwood. It was then and there that the tragic significance of life first dimly awed and appealed to his questioning spirit: that the rhythm of humanity first touched deeply in him a corresponding chord.

  Chapter 2.

  It was certainly about this time, as he admitted once in one of his rare reminiscent moods, that Browning felt the artistic impulse stirring within him, like the rising of the sap in a tree. He remembered his mother’s music, and hoped to be a musician: he recollected his father’s drawings, and certain seductive landscapes and seascapes by painters whom he had heard called “the Norwich men”, and he wished to be an artist: then reminiscences of the Homeric lines he loved, of haunting verse-melodies, moved him most of all.

  ”I shall never, in the years remaining,

  Paint you pictures, no, nor carve you statues,

  Make you music that should all-express me:

  . . . verse alone, one life allows me.”

  He now gave way to the compulsive Byronic vogue, with an occasional relapse to the polished artificialism of his father’s idol among British poets. There were several ballads written at this time: if I remember aright, the poet specified the “Death of Harold” as the theme of one. Long afterwards he read these boyish forerunners of “Over the sea our galleys went”, and “How they Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix”, and was amused by their derivative if delicate melodies. Mrs. Browning was very proud of these early blooms of song, and when her twelve-year-old son, tired of vain efforts to seduce a publisher from the wary ways of business, surrendered in disgust his neatly copied out and carefully stitched MSS., she lost no opportunity — when Mr. Browning was absent — to expatiate upon their merits. Among the people to whom she showed them was a Miss Flower. This lady took them home, perused them, discerned dormant genius lurking behind the boyish handwriting, read them to her sister (afterwards to become known as Sarah Flower Adams), copied them out before returning them, and persuaded the celebrated Rev. William Johnson Fox to read the transcripts. Mr. Fox agreed with Miss Flower as to the promise, but not altogether as to the actual accomplishment, nor at all as to the advisability of publication. The originals are supposed to have been destroyed by the poet during the eventful period when, owing to a fortunate gift, poetry became a new thing for him: from a dream, vague, if seductive, as summer-lightning, transformed to a dominating reality. Passing a bookstall one day, he saw, in a box of second-hand volumes, a little book advertised as “Mr. Shelley’s Atheistical Poem: very scarce.” He had never heard of Shelley, nor did he learn for a long time that the “Daemon of the World”, and the miscellaneous poems appended thereto, constituted a literary piracy. Badly printed, shamefully mutilated, these discarded blossoms touched him to a new emotion. Pope became further removed than ever: Byron, even, lost his magnetic supremacy. From vague remarks in reply to his inquiries, and from one or two casual allusions, he learned that there really was a poet called Shelley; that he had written several volumes; that he was dead.

  Strange as it may seem, Browning declared once that the news of this unknown singer’s death affected him more poignantly than did, a year or less earlier, the tidings of Byron’s heroic end at Missolonghi. He begged his mother to procure him Shelley’s works, a request not easily complied with, for the excellent reason that not one of the local booksellers had even heard of the poet’s name. Ultimately, however, Mrs. Browning learned that what she sought was procurable at the Olliers’ in Vere Street, London.

  She was very pleased with the result of her visit. The books, it is true, seemed unattractive: but they would please Robert, no doubt. If that packet had been lost we should not have had “Pauline”: we might have had a different Browning. It contained most of Shelley’s writings, all in their first edition, with the exception of “The Cenci”: in addition, there were three volumes by an even less known poet, John Keats, which kindly Mrs. Browning had been persuaded to include in her purchase on Mr. Ollier’s assurance that they were the poetic kindred of Shelley’s writings, and that Mr. Keats was the subject of the elegiac poem in the purple paper cover, with the foreign-looking type and the imprint “Pisa” at the foot of the title-page, entitled “Adonais”. What an evening for the young poet that must have been. He told a friend it was a May night, and that in a laburnum, “heavy with its weight of gold,” and in a great copper-beech at the end of a neighbour’s garden, two nightingales strove one against the other. For a moment it is a pleasant fancy to imagine that there the souls of Keats and Shelley uttered the
ir enfranchised music, not in rivalry but in welcome. We can realise, perhaps, something of the startled delight, of the sudden electric tremors, of the young poet when, with eager eyes, he turned over the pages of “Epipsychidion” or “Prometheus Unbound”, “Alastor” or “Endymion”, or the Odes to a Nightingale, on Melancholy, on a Grecian Urn.

  More than once Browning alluded to this experience as his first pervasive joy, his first free happiness in outlook. Often in after life he was fain, like his “wise thrush”, to “recapture that first fine carefree rapture.” It was an eventful eve.

  ”And suddenly, without heart-wreck, I awoke

  As from a dream.”

  Thenceforth his poetic development was rapid, and continuous. Shelley enthralled him most. The fire and spirit of the great poet’s verse, wild and strange often, but ever with an exquisiteness of music which seemed to his admirer, then and later, supreme, thrilled him to a very passion of delight. Something of the more richly coloured, the more human rhythm of Keats affected him also. Indeed, a line from the Ode to a Nightingale, in common with one of the loveliest passages in “Epipsychidion”, haunted him above all others: and again and again in his poems we may encounter vague echoes of those “remote isles” and “perilous seas” — as, for example, in “the dim clustered isles of the blue sea” of “Pauline”, and the “some isle, with the sea’s silence on it — some unsuspected isle in the far seas!” of “Pippa Passes”.

  But of course he had other matters for mental occupation besides poetry. His education at Mr. Ready’s private academy seems to have been excellent so far as it went. He remained there till he was fourteen. Perhaps because of the few boarders at the school, possibly from his own reticence in self-disclosure, he does not seem to have impressed any school-mate deeply. We hear of no one who “knew Browning at school.” His best education, after all, was at home. His father and mother incidentally taught him as much as Mr. Ready: his love of painting and music was fostered, indirectly: and in the `dovecot’ bookshelf above the fireplace in his bedroom, were the precious volumes within whose sway and magic was his truest life.