Robert Browning - Delphi Poets Series

by Robert Browning

  * The date is given in the edition of 1868 as London 185-;

  in the Tauchnitz selection of 1872, London and Florence 184-

  and 185-; in the new English edition 184-and 185-.

  ‘Karshook’ appeared in 1856 in ‘The Keepsake’, edited by Miss Power; but, as we are told on good authority, has been printed in no edition or selection of the Poet’s works. I am therefore justified in inserting it here.

  I

  ‘Would a man ‘scape the rod?’

  Rabbi Ben Karshook saith,

  ‘See that he turn to God

  The day before his death.’

  ‘Ay, could a man inquire

  When it shall come!’ I say.

  The Rabbi’s eye shoots fire —

  ‘Then let him turn to-day!’

  II

  Quoth a young Sadducee:

  ‘Reader of many rolls,

  Is it so certain we

  Have, as they tell us, souls?’

  ‘Son, there is no reply!’

  The Rabbi bit his beard:

  ‘Certain, a soul have I —

  We may have none,’ he sneer’d.

  Thus Karshook, the Hiram’s-Hammer,

  The Right-hand Temple-column,

  Taught babes in grace their grammar,

  And struck the simple, solemn.

  Among this first collection of ‘Men and Women’ was the poem called ‘Two in the Campagna’. It is a vivid, yet enigmatical little study of a restless spirit tantalized by glimpses of repose in love, saddened and perplexed by the manner in which this eludes it. Nothing that should impress one as more purely dramatic ever fell from Mr. Browning’s pen. We are told, nevertheless, in Mr. Sharp’s ‘Life’, that a personal character no less actual than that of the ‘Guardian Angel’ has been claimed for it. The writer, with characteristic delicacy, evades all discussion of the question; but he concedes a great deal in his manner of doing so. The poem, he says, conveys a sense of that necessary isolation of the individual soul which resists the fusing power of the deepest love; and its meaning cannot be personally — because it is universally — true. I do not think Mr. Browning meant to emphasize this aspect of the mystery of individual life, though the poem, in a certain sense, expresses it. We have no reason to believe that he ever accepted it as constant; and in no case could he have intended to refer its conditions to himself. He was often isolated by the processes of his mind; but there was in him no barrier to that larger emotional sympathy which we think of as sympathy of the soul. If this poem were true, ‘One Word More’ would be false, quite otherwise than in that approach to exaggeration which is incidental to the poetic form. The true keynote of ‘Two in the Campagna’ is the pain of perpetual change, and of the conscious, though unexplained, predestination to it. Mr. Browning could have still less in common with such a state, since one of the qualities for which he was most conspicuous was the enormous power of anchorage which his affections possessed. Only length of time and variety of experience could fully test this power or fully display it; but the signs of it had not been absent from even his earliest life. He loved fewer people in youth than in advancing age: nature and circumstance combined to widen the range, and vary the character of his human interests; but where once love or friendship had struck a root, only a moral convulsion could avail to dislodge it. I make no deduction from this statement when I admit that the last and most emphatic words of the poem in question,

  Only I discern —

  Infinite passion, and the pain

  Of finite hearts that yearn,

  did probably come from the poet’s heart, as they also found a deep echo in that of his wife, who much loved them.

  From London they returned to Paris for the winter of 1855-6. The younger of the Kemble sisters, Mrs. Sartoris, was also there with her family; and the pleasant meetings of the Campagna renewed themselves for Mr. Browning, though in a different form. He was also, with his sister, a constant visitor at Lady Elgin’s. Both they and Mrs. Browning were greatly attached to her, and she warmly reciprocated the feeling. As Mr. Locker’s letter has told us, Mr. Browning was in the habit of reading poetry to her, and when his sister had to announce his arrival from Italy or England, she would say: ‘Robert is coming to nurse you, and read to you.’ Lady Elgin was by this time almost completely paralyzed. She had lost the power of speech, and could only acknowledge the little attentions which were paid to her by some graceful pathetic gesture of the left hand; but she retained her sensibilities to the last; and Miss Browning received on one occasion a serious lesson in the risk of ever assuming that the appearance of unconsciousness guarantees its reality. Lady Augusta Bruce had asked her, in her mother’s presence, how Mrs. Browning was; and, imagining that Lady Elgin was unable to hear or understand, she had answered with incautious distinctness, ‘I am afraid she is very ill,’ when a little sob from the invalid warned her of her mistake. Lady Augusta quickly repaired it by rejoining, ‘but she is better than she was, is she not?’ Miss Browning of course assented.

  There were other friends, old and new, whom Mr. Browning occasionally saw, including, I need hardly say, the celebrated Madame Mohl. In the main, however, he led a quiet life, putting aside many inducements to leave his home.

  Mrs. Browning was then writing ‘Aurora Leigh’, and her husband must have been more than ever impressed by her power of work, as displayed by her manner of working. To him, as to most creative writers, perfect quiet was indispensable to literary production. She wrote in pencil, on scraps of paper, as she lay on the sofa in her sitting-room, open to interruption from chance visitors, or from her little omnipresent son; simply hiding the paper beside her if anyone came in, and taking it up again when she was free. And if this process was conceivable in the large, comparatively silent spaces of their Italian home, and amidst habits of life which reserved social intercourse for the close of the working day, it baffles belief when one thinks of it as carried on in the conditions of a Parisian winter, and the little ‘salon’ of the apartment in the Rue du Colisee in which those months were spent. The poem was completed in the ensuing summer, in Mr. Kenyon’s London house, and dedicated, October 17, in deeply pathetic words to that faithful friend, whom the writer was never to see again.

  The news of his death, which took place in December 1856, reached Mr. and Mrs. Browning in Florence, to be followed in the spring by that of Mrs. Browning’s father. Husband and wife had both determined to forego any pecuniary benefit which might accrue to them from this event; but they were not called upon to exercise their powers of renunciation. By Mr. Kenyon’s will they were the richer, as is now, I think, generally known, the one by six thousand, the other by four thousand guineas.* Of that cousin’s long kindness Mrs. Browning could scarcely in after-days trust herself to speak. It was difficult to her, she said, even to write his name without tears.

  * Mr. Kenyon had considerable wealth, derived, like Mr.

  Barrett’s, from West Indian estates.

  I have alluded, perhaps tardily, to Mr. Browning’s son, a sociable little being who must for some time have been playing a prominent part in his parents’ lives. I saw him for the first time in this winter of 1855-6, and remember the grave expression of the little round face, the outline of which was common, at all events in childhood, to all the members of his mother’s family, and was conspicuous in her, if we may trust an early portrait which has recently come to light. He wore the curling hair to which she refers in a later letter, and pretty frocks and frills, in which she delighted to clothe him. It is on record that, on one of the journeys of this year, a trunk was temporarily lost which contained Peni’s embroidered trousers, and the MS., whole or in part, of ‘Aurora Leigh’; and that Mrs. Browning had scarcely a thought to spare for her poem, in face of the damage to her little boy’s appearance which the accident involved.

  How he came by his familiar name of Penini — hence Peni, and Pen — neither signifies in itself, nor has much bearing on his father’s family history; but I cannot r
efrain from a word of comment on Mr. Hawthorne’s fantastic conjecture, which has been asserted and reasserted in opposition to Mr. Browning’s own statement of the case. According to Mr. Hawthorne, the name was derived from Apennino, and bestowed on the child in babyhood, because Apennino was a colossal statue, and he was so very small. It would be strange indeed that any joke connecting ‘Baby’ with a given colossal statue should have found its way into the family without father, mother, or nurse being aware of it; or that any joke should have been accepted there which implied that the little boy was not of normal size. But the fact is still more unanswerable that Apennino could by no process congenial to the Italian language be converted into Penini. Its inevitable abbreviation would be Pennino with a distinct separate sounding of the central n’s, or Nino. The accentuation of Penini is also distinctly German.

  During this winter in Paris, little Wiedemann, as his parents tried to call him — his full name was Robert Wiedemann Barrett — had developed a decided turn for blank verse. He would extemporize short poems, singing them to his mother, who wrote them down as he sang. There is no less proof of his having possessed a talent for music, though it first naturally showed itself in the love of a cheerful noise. His father had once sat down to the piano, for a serious study of some piece, when the little boy appeared, with the evident intention of joining in the performance. Mr. Browning rose precipitately, and was about to leave the room. ‘Oh!’ exclaimed the hurt mother, ‘you are going away, and he has brought his three drums to accompany you upon.’ She herself would undoubtedly have endured the mixed melody for a little time, though her husband did not think she seriously wished him to do so. But if he did not play the piano to the accompaniment of Pen’s drums, he played piano duets with him as soon as the boy was old enough to take part in them; and devoted himself to his instruction in this, as in other and more important branches of knowledge.

  Peni had also his dumb companions, as his father had had before him. Tortoises lived at one end of the famous balcony at Casa Guidi; and when the family were at the Baths of Lucca, Mr. Browning would stow away little snakes in his bosom, and produce them for the child’s amusement. As the child grew into a man, the love of animals which he had inherited became conspicuous in him; and it gave rise to many amusing and some pathetic little episodes of his artist life. The creatures which he gathered about him were generally, I think, more highly organized than those which elicited his father’s peculiar tenderness; it was natural that he should exact more pictorial or more companionable qualities from them. But father and son concurred in the fondness for snakes, and in a singular predilection for owls; and they had not been long established in Warwick Crescent, when a bird of that family was domesticated there. We shall hear of it in a letter from Mr. Browning.

  Of his son’s moral quality as quite a little child his father has told me pretty and very distinctive stories, but they would be out of place here.*

  * I am induced, on second thoughts, to subjoin one of these,

  for its testimony to the moral atmosphere into which the

  child had been born. He was sometimes allowed to play with a

  little boy not of his own class — perhaps the son of a

  ‘contadino’. The child was unobjectionable, or neither

  Penini nor his parents would have endured the association;

  but the servants once thought themselves justified in

  treating him cavalierly, and Pen flew indignant to his

  mother, to complain of their behaviour. Mrs. Browning at

  once sought little Alessandro, with kind words and a large

  piece of cake; but this, in Pen’s eyes, only aggravated the

  offence; it was a direct reflection on his visitor’s

  quality. ‘He doesn’t tome for take,’ he burst forth; ‘he

  tomes because he is my friend.’ How often, since I heard

  this first, have we repeated the words, ‘he doesn’t tome for

  take,’ in half-serious definition of a disinterested person

  or act! They became a standing joke.

  Mrs. Browning seems now to have adopted the plan of writing independent letters to her sister-in-law; and those available for our purpose are especially interesting. The buoyancy of tone which has habitually marked her communications, but which failed during the winter in Rome, reasserts itself in the following extract. Her maternal comments on Peni and his perfections have hitherto been so carefully excluded, that a brief allusion to him may be allowed on the present occasion.

  1857.

  ‘My dearest Sarianna, . . . Here is Penini’s letter, which takes up so much room that I must be sparing of mine — and, by the way, if you consider him improved in his writing, give the praise to Robert, who has been taking most patient pains with him indeed. You will see how the little curly head is turned with carnival doings. So gay a carnival never was in our experience, for until last year (when we were absent) all masks had been prohibited, and now everybody has eaten of the tree of good and evil till not an apple is left. Peni persecuted me to let him have a domino — with tears and embraces — he “almost never in all his life had had a domino,” and he would like it so. Not a black domino! no — he hated black — but a blue domino, trimmed with pink! that was his taste. The pink trimming I coaxed him out of, but for the rest, I let him have his way. . . . For my part, the universal madness reached me sitting by the fire (whence I had not stirred for three months), and you will open your eyes when I tell you that I went (in domino and masked) to the great opera-ball. Yes! I did, really. Robert, who had been invited two or three times to other people’s boxes, had proposed to return their kindness by taking a box himself at the opera this night, and entertaining two or three friends with galantine and champagne. Just as he and I were lamenting the impossibility of my going, on that very morning the wind changed, the air grew soft and mild, and he maintained that I might and should go. There was no time to get a domino of my own (Robert himself had a beautiful one made, and I am having it metamorphosed into a black silk gown for myself!) so I sent out and hired one, buying the mask. And very much amused I was. I like to see these characteristic things. (I shall never rest, Sarianna, till I risk my reputation at the ‘bal de l’opera’ at Paris). Do you think I was satisfied with staying in the box? No, indeed. Down I went, and Robert and I elbowed our way through the crowd to the remotest corner of the ball below. Somebody smote me on the shoulder and cried “Bella Mascherina!” and I answered as impudently as one feels under a mask. At two o’clock in the morning, however, I had to give up and come away (being overcome by the heavy air) and ingloriously left Robert and our friends to follow at half-past four. Think of the refinement and gentleness — yes, I must call it superiority of this people — when no excess, no quarrelling, no rudeness nor coarseness can be observed in the course of such wild masked liberty; not a touch of licence anywhere, and perfect social equality! Our servant Ferdinando side by side in the same ball-room with the Grand Duke, and no class’s delicacy offended against! For the Grand Duke went down into the ball-room for a short time. . . .’

  The summer of 1857 saw the family once more at the Baths of Lucca, and again in company with Mr. Lytton. He had fallen ill at the house of their common friend, Miss Blagden, also a visitor there; and Mr. Browning shared in the nursing, of which she refused to entrust any part to less friendly hands. He sat up with the invalid for four nights; and would doubtless have done so for as many more as seemed necessary, but that Mrs. Browning protested against this trifling with his own health.

  The only serious difference which ever arose between Mr. Browning and his wife referred to the subject of spiritualism. Mrs. Browning held doctrines which prepared her to accept any real or imagined phenomena betokening intercourse with the spirits of the dead; nor could she be repelled by anything grotesque or trivial in the manner of this intercourse, because it was no part of her belief that a spirit still inhabiting the atmosphere of our earth, should exhibit any dignity
or solemnity not belonging to him while he lived upon it. The question must have been discussed by them on its general grounds at a very early stage of their intimacy; but it only assumed practical importance when Mr. Home came to Florence in 1857 or 1858. Mr. Browning found himself compelled to witness some of the ‘manifestations’. He was keenly alive to their generally prosaic and irreverent character, and to the appearance of jugglery which was then involved in them. He absolutely denied the good faith of all the persons concerned. Mrs. Browning as absolutely believed it; and no compromise between them was attainable, because, strangely enough, neither of them admitted as possible that mediums or witnesses should deceive themselves. The personal aspect which the question thus received brought it into closer and more painful contact with their daily life. They might agree to differ as to the abstract merits of spiritualism; but Mr. Browning could not resign himself to his wife’s trustful attitude towards some of the individuals who at that moment represented it. He may have had no substantial fear of her doing anything that could place her in their power, though a vague dread of this seems to have haunted him; but he chafed against the public association of her name with theirs. Both his love for and his pride in her resented it.

  He had subsided into a more judicial frame of mind when he wrote ‘Sludge the Medium’, in which he says everything which can excuse the liar and, what is still more remarkable, modify the lie. So far back as the autumn of 1860 I heard him discuss the trickery which he believed himself to have witnessed, as dispassionately as any other non-credulous person might have done so. The experience must even before that have passed out of the foreground of his conjugal life. He remained, nevertheless, subject, for many years, to gusts of uncontrollable emotion which would sweep over him whenever the question of ‘spirits’ or ‘spiritualism’ was revived; and we can only understand this in connection with the peculiar circumstances of the case. With all his faith in the future, with all his constancy to the past, the memory of pain was stronger in him than any other. A single discordant note in the harmony of that married love, though merged in its actual existence, would send intolerable vibrations through his remembrance of it. And the pain had not been, in this instance, that of simple disagreement. It was complicated by Mrs. Browning’s refusal to admit that disagreement was possible. She never believed in her husband’s disbelief; and he had been not unreasonably annoyed by her always assuming it to be feigned. But his doubt of spiritualistic sincerity was not feigned. She cannot have thought, and scarcely can have meant to say so. She may have meant to say, ‘You believe that these are tricks, but you know that there is something real behind them;’ and so far, if no farther, she may have been in the right. Mr. Browning never denied the abstract possibility of spiritual communication with either living or dead; he only denied that such communication had ever been proved, or that any useful end could be subserved by it. The tremendous potentialities of hypnotism and thought-reading, now passing into the region of science, were not then so remote but that an imagination like his must have foreshadowed them. The natural basis of the seemingly supernatural had not yet entered into discussion. He may, from the first, have suspected the existence of some mysterious force, dangerous because not understood, and for this reason doubly liable to fall into dangerous hands. And if this was so, he would necessarily regard the whole system of manifestations with an apprehensive hostility, which was not entire negation, but which rebelled against any effort on the part of others, above all of those he loved, to interpret it into assent. The pain and anger which could be aroused in him by an indication on the part of a valued friend of even an impartial interest in the subject points especially to the latter conclusion.