Robert Browning - Delphi Poets Series

by Robert Browning

  At the beginning of July (1858), the Brownings left Florence for the summer and autumn, and by easy stages travelled to Normandy. Here the invalid benefited considerably at first: and here, I may add, Browning wrote his `Legend of Pornic’, `Gold Hair’. This poem of twenty-seven five-line stanzas (which differs only from that in more recent “Collected Works”, and “Selections”, in its lack of the three stanzas now numbered 21, 22, and 23) was printed for limited private circulation, though primarily for the purpose of securing American copyright. Browning several times printed single poems thus, and for the same reasons — that is, either for transatlantic copyright, or when the verses were not likely to be included in any volume for a prolonged period. These leaflets or half-sheetlets of `Gold Hair’ and `Prospice’, of `Cleon’ and `The Statue and the Bust’ — together with the `Two Poems by Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning’, published, for benefit of a charity, in 1854 — are among the rarest “finds” for the collector, and are literally worth a good deal more than their weight in gold.

  In the tumultuous year of 1859 all Italy was in a ferment. No patriot among the Nationalists was more ardent in her hopes than the delicate, too fragile, dying poetess, whose flame of life burned anew with the great hopes that animated her for her adopted country. Well indeed did she deserve, among the lines which the poet Tommaseo wrote and the Florence municipality caused to be engraved in gold upon a white marble slab, to be placed upon Casa Guidi, the words `fece del suo verso aureo anello fra Italia e Inghilterra’ — “who of her Verse made a golden link connecting England and Italy.”

  The victories of Solferino and San Martino made the bitterness of the disgraceful Treaty of Villafranca the more hard to bear. Even had we not Mr. Story’s evidence, it would be a natural conclusion that this disastrous ending to the high hopes of the Italian patriots accelerated Mrs. Browning’s death. The withdrawal of hope is often worse in its physical effects than any direct bodily ill.

  It was a miserable summer for both husband and wife, for more private sorrows also pressed upon them. Not even the sweet autumnal winds blowing upon Siena wafted away the shadow that had settled upon the invalid: nor was there medicine for her in the air of Rome, where the winter was spent. A temporary relief, however, was afforded by the more genial climate, and in the spring of 1860 she was able, with Browning’s help, to see her Italian patriotic poems through the press. It goes without saying that these “Poems before Congress” had a grudging reception from the critics, because they dared to hint that all was not roseate-hued in England. The true patriots are those who love despite blemishes, not those who cherish the blemishes along with the virtues. To hint at a flaw is “not to be an Englishman.”

  The autumn brought a new sadness in the death of Miss Arabella Barrett — a dearly loved sister, the “Arabel” of so many affectionate letters. Once more a winter in Rome proved temporally restorative. But at last the day came when she wrote her last poem — “North and South”, a gracious welcome to Hans Christian Andersen on the occasion of his first visit to the Eternal City.

  Early in June of 1861 the Brownings were once more at Casa Guidi. But soon after their return the invalid caught a chill. For a few days she hovered like a tired bird — though her friends saw only the seemingly unquenchable light in the starry eyes, and did not anticipate the silence that was soon to be.

  By the evening of the 28th day of the month she was in sore peril of failing breath. All night her husband sat by her, holding her hand. Two hours before dawn she realised that her last breath would ere long fall upon his tear-wet face. Then, as a friend has told us, she passed into a state of ecstasy: yet not so rapt therein but that she could whisper many words of hope, even of joy. With the first light of the new day, she leaned against her lover. Awhile she lay thus in silence, and then, softly sighing “It is beautiful!” passed like the windy fragrance of a flower.

  Chapter 9.

  It is needless to dwell upon what followed. The world has all that need be known. To Browning himself it was the abrupt, the too deeply pathetic, yet not wholly unhappy ending of a lovelier poem than any he or another should ever write, the poem of their married life.

  There is a rare serenity in the thought of death when it is known to be the gate of life. This conviction Browning had, and so his grief was rather that of one whose joy has westered earlier. The sweetest music of his life had withdrawn: but there was still music for one to whom life in itself was a happiness. He had his son, and was not void of other solace: but even had it been otherwise he was of the strenuous natures who never succumb, nor wish to die — whatever accident of mortality overcome the will and the power.

  It was in the autumn following his wife’s death that he wrote the noble poem to which allusion has already been made: “Prospice”. Who does not thrill to its close, when all of gloom or terror

  ”Shall change, shall become first a peace out of pain,

  Then a light, then thy breast,

  O thou soul of my soul! I shall clasp thee again,

  And with God be the rest.”

  There are few direct allusions to his wife in Browning’s poems. Of those prior to her death the most beautiful is “One Word More”, which has been already quoted in part: of the two or three subsequent to that event none surpasses the magic close of the first part of “The Ring and the Book”.

  Thereafter the details of his life are public property. He all along lived in the light, partly from his possession of that serenity which made Goethe glad to be alive and to be able to make others share in that gladness. No poet has been more revered and more loved. His personality will long be a stirring tradition. In the presence of his simple manliness and wealth of all generous qualities one is inclined to pass by as valueless, as the mere flying spray of the welcome shower, the many honours and gratifications that befell him. Even if these things mattered, concerning one by whose genius we are fascinated, while undazzled by the mere accidents pertinent thereto, their recital would be wearisome — of how he was asked to be Lord Rector of this University, or made a doctor of laws at that: of how letters and tributes of all kinds came to him from every district in our Empire, from every country in the world: and so forth. All these things are implied in the circumstance that his life was throughout “a noble music with a golden ending.”

  In 1866 his father died in Paris, strenuous in life until the very end. After this event Miss Sarianna Browning went to reside with her brother, and from that time onward was his inseparable companion, and ever one of the dearest and most helpful of friends. In latter years brother and sister were constantly seen together, and so regular attendants were they at such functions as the “Private Views” at the Royal Academy and Grosvenor Gallery, that these never seemed complete without them. A Private View, a first appearance of Joachim or Sarasate, a first concert of Richter or Henschel or Halle, at each of these, almost to a certainty, the poet was sure to appear. The chief personal happiness of his later life was in his son. Mr. R. Barrett Browning is so well known as a painter and sculptor that it would be superfluous for me to add anything further here, except to state that his successes were his father’s keenest pleasures.

  Two years after his father’s death, that is in 1868, the “Poetical Works of Robert Browning, M.A., Honorary Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford”, were issued in six volumes. Here the equator of Browning’s genius may be drawn. On the further side lie the “Men and Women” of the period anterior to “The Ring and the Book”: midway is the transitional zone itself: on the hither side are the “Men and Women” of a more temperate if not colder clime.

  The first part of “The Ring and the Book” was not published till November. In September the poet was staying with his sister and son at Le Croisic, a picturesque village at the mouth of the Loire, at the end of the great salt plains which stretch down from Guerande to the Bay of Biscay. No doubt, in lying on the sand-dunes in the golden September glow, in looking upon the there somewhat turbid current of the Loire, the poet brooded on
those days when he saw its inland waters with her who was with him no longer save in dreams and memories. Here he wrote that stirring poem, “Herve Riel”, founded upon the valorous action of a French sailor who frustrated the naval might of England, and claimed nothing as a reward save permission to have a holiday on land to spend a few hours with his wife, “la belle Aurore”. “Herve Riel” (which has been translated into French, and is often recited, particularly in the maritime towns, and is always evocative of enthusiastic applause) is one of Browning’s finest action-lyrics, and is assured of the same immortality as “How they brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix”, or the “Pied Piper” himself.

  In 1872 there was practical proof of the poet’s growing popularity. Baron Tauchnitz issued two volumes of excellently selected poems, comprising some of the best of “Men and Women”, “Dramatis Personae”, and “Dramatic Romances”, besides the longer “Soul’s Tragedy”, “Luria”, “In a Balcony”, and “Christmas Eve and Easter Day” — the most Christian poem of the century, according to one eminent cleric, the heterodox self-sophistication of a free-thinker, according to another: really, the reflex of a great crisis, that of the first movement of the tide of religious thought to a practically limitless freedom. This edition also contained “Bishop Blougram”, then much discussed, apart from its poetic and intellectual worth, on account of its supposed verisimilitude in portraiture of Cardinal Wiseman. This composition, one of Browning’s most characteristic, is so clever that it is scarcely a poem. Poetry and Cleverness do not well agree, the muse being already united in perfect marriage to Imagination. In his Essay on Truth, Bacon says that one of the Fathers called poetry `Vinum Daemonum’, because it filleth the imagination. Certainly if it be not `vinum daemonum’ it is not Poetry.

  In this year also appeared the first series of “Selections” by the poet’s latest publishers: “Dedicated to Alfred Tennyson. In Poetry — illustrious and consummate: In Friendship — noble and sincere.” It was in his preface to this selection that he wrote the often-quoted words: “Nor do I apprehend any more charges of being wilfully obscure, unconscientiously careless, or perversely harsh.” At or about the date of these “Selections” the poet wrote to a friend, on this very point of obscurity, “I can have little doubt that my writing has been in the main too hard for many I should have been pleased to communicate with; but I never designedly tried to puzzle people, as some of my critics have supposed. On the other hand, I never pretended to offer such literature as should be a substitute for a cigar or a game at dominoes to an idle man. So perhaps, on the whole, I get my deserts, and something over — not a crowd, but a few I value more.”

  In 1877 Browning, ever restless for pastures new, went with his sister to spend the autumn at La Saisiaz (Savoyard for “the sun”), a villa among the mountains near Geneva; this time with the additional company of Miss Anne Egerton Smith, an intimate and valued friend. But there was an unhappy close to the holiday. Miss Smith died on the night of the fourteenth of September, from heart complaint. “La Saisiaz” is the direct outcome of this incident, and is one of the most beautiful of Browning’s later poems. Its trochaics move with a tide-like sound.

  At the close, there is a line which might stand as epitaph for the poet —

  “He, at least, believed in Soul, was very sure of God.”

  In the following year “La Saisiaz” was published along with “The Two Poets of Croisic”, which was begun and partly written at the little French village ten years previously. There is nothing of the eight-score stanzas of the “Two Poets” to equal its delightful epilogue, or the exquisite prefatory lyric, beginning

  ”Such a starved bank of moss

  Till that May-morn

  Blue ran the flash across:

  Violets were born.”

  Extremely interesting — and for myself I cannot find “The Two Poets of Croisic” to be anything more than “interesting” — it is as a poem distinctly inferior to “La Saisiaz”. Although detached lines are often far from truly indicative of the real poetic status of a long poem, where proportion and harmony are of more importance than casual exfoliations of beauty, yet to a certain extent they do serve as musical keys that give the fundamental tone. One certainly would have to search in vain to find in the Croisic poem such lines as

  ”Five short days, scarce enough to

  Bronze the clustered wilding apple, redden ripe the mountain ash.”

  Or these of Mont Blanc, seen at sunset, towering over icy pinnacles and teeth-like peaks,

  ”Blanc, supreme above his earth-brood, needles red and white and green,

  Horns of silver, fangs of crystal set on edge in his demesne.”

  Or, again, this of the sun swinging himself above the dark shoulder of Jura —

  “Gay he hails her, and magnific, thrilled her black length burns to gold.”

  Or, finally, this sounding verse —

  “Past the city’s congregated peace of homes and pomp of spires.”

  The other poems later than “The Ring and the Book” are, broadly speaking, of two kinds. On the one side may be ranged the groups which really cohere with “Men and Women”. These are “The Inn Album”, the miscellaneous poems of the “Pacchiarotto” volume, the “Dramatic Idyls”, some of “Jocoseria”, and some of “Asolando”. “Ferishtah’s Fancies” and “Parleyings” are not, collectively, dramatic poems, but poems of illuminative insight guided by a dramatic imagination.* They, and the classical poems and translations (renderings, rather, by one whose own individuality dominates them to the exclusion of that NEARNESS of the original author, which it should be the primary aim of the translator to evoke), the beautiful “Balaustion’s Adventure”, “Aristophanes’ Apology”, and “The Agamemnon of Aeschylus”, and the third group, which comprises “Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau”, “Red Cotton Nightcap Country”, and “Fifine at the Fair” — these three groups are of the second kind.

  —

  * In a letter to a friend, Browning wrote: — “I hope and believe

  that one or two careful readings of the Poem [Ferishtah’s Fancies]

  will make its sense clear enough. Above all, pray allow

  for the Poet’s inventiveness in any case, and do not suppose

  there is more than a thin disguise of a few Persian names and allusions.

  There was no such person as Ferishtah — the stories are all inventions.

  . . . The Hebrew quotations are put in for a purpose,

  as a direct acknowledgment that certain doctrines may be found

  in the Old Book, which the Concocters of Novel Schemes of Morality

  put forth as discoveries of their own.”

  —

  Remarkable as are the three last-named productions, it is extremely doubtful if the first and second will be read for pleasure by readers born after the close of this century. As it is impossible, in my narrow limits, to go into any detail about poems which personally I do not regard as essential to the truest understanding of Browning, the truest because on the highest level, that of poetry — as distinct from dogma, or intellectual suasion of any kind that might, for all its aesthetic charm, be in prose — it would be presumptuous to assert anything derogatory of them without attempting adequate substantiation. I can, therefore, merely state my own opinion. To reiterate, it is that, for different reasons, these three long poems are foredoomed to oblivion — not, of course, to be lost to the student of our literature and of our age, a more wonderful one even than that of the Renaissance, but to lapse from the general regard. That each will for a long time find appreciative readers is certain. They have a fascination for alert minds, and they have not infrequent ramifications which are worth pursuing for the glimpses afforded into an always evanishing Promised Land. “Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau” (the name, by the way, is not purely fanciful, being formed from Hohen Schwangau, one of the castles of the late King of Bavaria) is Browning’s complement to his wife’s “Ode to Napoleon III.” “Red Cotton Nightcap Country” is
a true story, the narrative of the circumstances pertinent to the tragic death of one Antonio Mellerio, a Paris jeweller, which occurred in 1870 at St. Aubin in Normandy, where, indeed, the poet first heard of it in all its details. It is a story which, if the method of poetry and the method of prose could for a moment be accepted as equivalent, might be said to be of the school of a light and humorously grotesque Zola. It has the fundamental weakness of “The Ring and the Book” — the weakness of an inadequate ethical basis. It is, indeed, to that great work what a second-rate novelette is to a masterpiece of fiction.

  “Fifine at the Fair”, on the other hand, is so powerful and often so beautiful a poem that one would be rash indeed were he, with the blithe critical assurance which is so generally snuffed out like a useless candle by a later generation, to prognosticate its inevitable seclusion from the high place it at present occupies in the estimate of the poet’s most uncompromising admirers. But surely equally rash is the assertion that it will be the “poem of the future”. However, our concern is not with problematical estimates, but with the poem as it appears to US. It is one of the most characteristic of Browning’s productions. It would be impossible for the most indolent reader or critic to attribute it, even if anonymous, to another parentage. Coleridge alludes somewhere to certain verses of Wordsworth’s, with the declaration that if he had met them howling in the desert he would have recognised their authorship. “Fifine” would not even have to howl.

  Browning was visiting Pornic one autumn, when he saw the gipsy who was the original of “Fifine”. In the words of Mrs. Orr, “his fancy was evidently set roaming by the gipsy’s audacity, her strength — the contrast which she presented to the more spiritual types of womanhood; and this contrast eventually found expression in a pathetic theory of life, in which these opposite types and their corresponding modes of attraction became the necessary complement of each other. As he laid down the theory, Mr. Browning would be speaking in his own person. But he would turn into some one else in the act of working it out — for it insensibly carried with it a plea for yielding to those opposite attractions, not only successively, but at the same time; and a modified Don Juan would grow up under his pen.”