Robert Browning - Delphi Poets Series

by Robert Browning

  Mr. Mortimer’s generalization does not apply to ‘The Statue and the Bust’, since Mr. Browning has made it perfectly clear that, in this case, the intended act is postponed without reference to its morality, and simply in consequence of a weakness of will, which would have been as paralyzing to a good purpose as it was to the bad one; but it is not without superficial sanction in ‘Fifine at the Fair’; and the part which the author allowed himself to play in it did him an injustice only to be measured by the inference which it has been made to support. There could be no mistake more ludicrous, were it less regrettable, than that of classing Mr. Browning, on moral grounds, with Byron or Shelley; even in the case of Goethe the analogy breaks down. The evidence of the foregoing pages has rendered all protest superfluous. But the suggested moral resemblance to the two English poets receives a striking comment in a fact of Mr. Browning’s life which falls practically into the present period of our history: his withdrawal from Shelley of the devotion of more than forty years on account of an act of heartlessness towards his first wife which he held to have been proved against him.

  The sweet and the bitter lay, indeed, very close to each other at the sources of Mr. Browning’s inspiration. Both proceeded, in great measure, from his spiritual allegiance to the past — that past by which it was impossible that he should linger, but which he could not yet leave behind. The present came to him with friendly greeting. He was unconsciously, perhaps inevitably, unjust to what it brought. The injustice reacted upon himself, and developed by degrees into the cynical mood of fancy which became manifest in ‘Fifine at the Fair’.

  It is true that, in the light of this explanation, we see an effect very unlike its cause; but the chemistry of human emotion is like that of natural life. It will often form a compound in which neither of its constituents can be recognized. This perverse poem was the last as well as the first manifestation of an ungenial mood of Mr. Browning’s mind. A slight exception may be made for some passages in ‘Red Cotton Nightcap Country’, and for one of the poems of the ‘Pacchiarotto’ volume; but otherwise no sign of moral or mental disturbance betrays itself in his subsequent work. The past and the present gradually assumed for him a more just relation to each other. He learned to meet life as it offered itself to him with a more frank recognition of its good gifts, a more grateful response to them. He grew happier, hence more genial, as the years advanced.

  It was not without misgiving that Mr. Browning published ‘Fifine at the Fair’; but many years were to pass before he realized the kind of criticism to which it had exposed him. The belief conveyed in the letter to Miss Blagden that what proceeds from a genuine inspiration is justified by it, combined with the indifference to public opinion which had been engendered in him by its long neglect, made him slow to anticipate the results of external judgment, even where he was in some degree prepared to endorse them. For his value as a poet, it was best so.

  The August of 1872 and of 1873 again found him with his sister at St.-Aubin, and the earlier visit was an important one: since it supplied him with the materials of his next work, of which Miss Annie Thackeray, there also for a few days, suggested the title. The tragic drama which forms the subject of Mr. Browning’s poem had been in great part enacted in the vicinity of St.-Aubin; and the case of disputed inheritance to which it had given rise was pending at that moment in the tribunals of Caen. The prevailing impression left on Miss Thackeray’s mind by this primitive district was, she declared, that of white cotton nightcaps (the habitual headgear of the Normandy peasants). She engaged to write a story called ‘White Cotton Nightcap Country’; and Mr. Browning’s quick sense of both contrast and analogy inspired the introduction of this emblem of repose into his own picture of that peaceful, prosaic existence, and of the ghastly spiritual conflict to which it had served as background. He employed a good deal of perhaps strained ingenuity in the opening pages of the work, in making the white cap foreshadow the red, itself the symbol of liberty, and only indirectly connected with tragic events; and he would, I think, have emphasized the irony of circumstance in a manner more characteristic of himself, if he had laid his stress on the remoteness from ‘the madding crowd’, and repeated Miss Thackeray’s title. There can, however, be no doubt that his poetic imagination, no less than his human insight, was amply vindicated by his treatment of the story.

  On leaving St.-Aubin he spent a month at Fontainebleau, in a house situated on the outskirts of the forest; and here his principal indoor occupation was reading the Greek dramatists, especially Aeschylus, to whom he had returned with revived interest and curiosity. ‘Red Cotton Nightcap Country’ was not begun till his return to London in the later autumn. It was published in the early summer of 1873.

  Chapter 17

  1873-1878

  London Life — Love of Music — Miss Egerton-Smith — Periodical Nervous Exhaustion — Mers; ‘Aristophanes’ Apology’ — ’Agamemnon’ — ’The Inn Album’ — ’Pacchiarotto and other Poems’ — Visits to Oxford and Cambridge — Letters to Mrs. Fitz-Gerald — St. Andrews; Letter from Professor Knight — In the Savoyard Mountains — Death of Miss Egerton-Smith — ’La Saisiaz’; ‘The Two Poets of Croisic’ — Selections from his Works.

  The period on which we have now entered, covering roughly the ten or twelve years which followed the publication of ‘The Ring and the Book’, was the fullest in Mr. Browning’s life; it was that in which the varied claims made by it on his moral, and above all his physical energies, found in him the fullest power of response. He could rise early and go to bed late — this, however, never from choice; and occupy every hour of the day with work or pleasure, in a manner which his friends recalled regretfully in later years, when of two or three engagements which ought to have divided his afternoon, a single one — perhaps only the most formally pressing — could be fulfilled. Soon after his final return to England, while he still lived in comparative seclusion, certain habits of friendly intercourse, often superficial, but always binding, had rooted themselves in his life. London society, as I have also implied, opened itself to him in ever-widening circles, or, as it would be truer to say, drew him more and more deeply into its whirl; and even before the mellowing kindness of his nature had infused warmth into the least substantial of his social relations, the imaginative curiosity of the poet — for a while the natural ambition of the man — found satisfaction in it. For a short time, indeed, he entered into the fashionable routine of country-house visiting. Besides the instances I have already given, and many others which I may have forgotten, he was heard of, during the earlier part of this decade, as the guest of Lord Carnarvon at Highclere Castle, of Lord Shrewsbury at Alton Towers, of Lord Brownlow and his mother, Lady Marian Alford, at Belton and Ashridge. Somewhat later, he stayed with Mr. and Lady Alice Gaisford at a house they temporarily occupied on the Sussex downs; with Mr. Cholmondeley at Condover, and, much more recently, at Aynhoe Park with Mr. and Mrs. Cartwright. Kind and pressing, and in themselves very tempting invitations of this nature came to him until the end of his life; but he very soon made a practice of declining them, because their acceptance could only renew for him the fatigues of the London season, while the tantalizing beauty and repose of the country lay before his eyes; but such visits, while they continued, were one of the necessary social experiences which brought their grist to his mill.

  And now, in addition to the large social tribute which he received, and had to pay, he was drinking in all the enjoyment, and incurring all the fatigue which the London musical world could create for him. In Italy he had found the natural home of the other arts. The one poem, ‘Old Pictures in Florence’, is sufficiently eloquent of long communion with the old masters and their works; and if his history in Florence and Rome had been written in his own letters instead of those of his wife, they must have held many reminiscences of galleries and studios, and of the places in which pictures are bought and sold. But his love for music was as certainly starved as the delight in painting and sculpture was nourished; and it had now grow
n into a passion, from the indulgence of which he derived, as he always declared, some of the most beneficent influences of his life. It would be scarcely an exaggeration to say that he attended every important concert of the season, whether isolated or given in a course. There was no engagement possible or actual, which did not yield to the discovery of its clashing with the day and hour fixed for one of these. His frequent companion on such occasions was Miss Egerton-Smith.

  Miss Smith became only known to Mr. Browning’s general acquaintance through the dedicatory ‘A. E. S.’ of ‘La Saisiaz’; but she was, at the time of her death, one of his oldest women friends. He first met her as a young woman in Florence when she was visiting there; and the love for and proficiency in music soon asserted itself as a bond of sympathy between them. They did not, however, see much of each other till he had finally left Italy, and she also had made her home in London. She there led a secluded life, although free from family ties, and enjoying a large income derived from the ownership of an important provincial paper. Mr. Browning was one of the very few persons whose society she cared to cultivate; and for many years the common musical interest took the practical, and for both of them convenient form, of their going to concerts together. After her death, in the autumn of 1877, he almost mechanically renounced all the musical entertainments to which she had so regularly accompanied him. The special motive and special facility were gone — she had been wont to call for him in her carriage; the habit was broken; there would have been first pain, and afterwards an unwelcome exertion in renewing it. Time was also beginning to sap his strength, while society, and perhaps friendship, were making increasing claims upon it. It may have been for this same reason that music after a time seemed to pass out of his life altogether. Yet its almost sudden eclipse was striking in the case of one who not only had been so deeply susceptible to its emotional influences, so conversant with its scientific construction and its multitudinous forms, but who was acknowledged as ‘musical’ by those who best knew the subtle and complex meaning of that often misused term.

  Mr. Browning could do all that I have said during the period through which we are now following him; but he could not quite do it with impunity. Each winter brought its searching attack of cold and cough; each summer reduced him to the state of nervous prostration or physical apathy of which I have already spoken, and which at once rendered change imperative, and the exertion of seeking it almost intolerable. His health and spirits rebounded at the first draught of foreign air; the first breath from an English cliff or moor might have had the same result. But the remembrance of this fact never nerved him to the preliminary effort. The conviction renewed itself with the close of every season, that the best thing which could happen to him would be to be left quiet at home; and his disinclination to face even the idea of moving equally hampered his sister in her endeavour to make timely arrangements for their change of abode.

  This special craving for rest helped to limit the area from which their summer resort could be chosen. It precluded all idea of ‘pension’-life, hence of any much-frequented spot in Switzerland or Germany. It was tacitly understood that the shortening days were not to be passed in England. Italy did not yet associate itself with the possibilities of a moderately short absence; the resources of the northern French coast were becoming exhausted; and as the August of 1874 approached, the question of how and where this and the following months were to be spent was, perhaps, more than ever a perplexing one. It was now Miss Smith who became the means of its solution. She had more than once joined Mr. and Miss Browning at the seaside. She was anxious this year to do so again, and she suggested for their meeting a quiet spot called Mers, almost adjoining the fashionable Treport, but distinct from it. It was agreed that they should try it; and the experiment, which they had no reason to regret, opened also in some degree a way out of future difficulties. Mers was young, and had the defect of its quality. Only one desirable house was to be found there; and the plan of joint residence became converted into one of joint housekeeping, in which Mr. and Miss Browning at first refused to concur, but which worked so well that it was renewed in the three ensuing summers: Miss Smith retaining the initiative in the choice of place, her friends the right of veto upon it. They stayed again together in 1875 at Villers, on the coast of Normandy; in 1876 at the Isle of Arran; in 1877 at a house called La Saisiaz — Savoyard for the sun — in the Saleve district near Geneva.

  The autumn months of 1874 were marked for Mr. Browning by an important piece of work: the production of ‘Aristophanes’ Apology’. It was far advanced when he returned to London in November, after a visit to Antwerp, where his son was studying art under M. Heyermans; and its much later appearance must have been intended to give breathing time to the readers of ‘Red Cotton Nightcap Country’. Mr. Browning subsequently admitted that he sometimes, during these years, allowed active literary occupation to interfere too much with the good which his holiday might have done him; but the temptations to literary activity were this time too great to be withstood. The house occupied by him at Mers (Maison Robert) was the last of the straggling village, and stood on a rising cliff. In front was the open sea; beyond it a long stretch of down; everywhere comparative solitude. Here, in uninterrupted quiet, and in a room devoted to his use, Mr. Browning would work till the afternoon was advanced, and then set forth on a long walk over the cliffs, often in the face of a wind which, as he wrote of it at the time, he could lean against as if it were a wall. And during this time he was living, not only in his work, but with the man who had inspired it. The image of Aristophanes, in the half-shamed insolence, the disordered majesty, in which he is placed before the reader’s mind, was present to him from the first moment in which the Defence was conceived. What was still more interesting, he could see him, hear him, think with him, speak for him, and still inevitably condemn him. No such instance of always ingenious, and sometimes earnest pleading foredoomed to complete discomfiture, occurs in Mr. Browning’s works.

  To Aristophanes he gave the dramatic sympathy which one lover of life can extend to another, though that other unduly extol its lower forms. To Euripides he brought the palm of the higher truth, to his work the tribute of the more pathetic human emotion. Even these for a moment ministered to the greatness of Aristophanes, in the tear shed by him to the memory of his rival, in the hour of his own triumph; and we may be quite sure that when Mr. Browning depicted that scene, and again when he translated the great tragedian’s words, his own eyes were dimmed. Large tears fell from them, and emotion choked his voice, when he first read aloud the transcript of the ‘Herakles’ to a friend, who was often privileged to hear him.

  Mr. Browning’s deep feeling for the humanities of Greek literature, and his almost passionate love for the language, contrasted strongly with his refusal to regard even the first of Greek writers as models of literary style. The pretensions raised for them on this ground were inconceivable to him; and his translation of the ‘Agamemnon’, published 1877, was partly made, I am convinced, for the pleasure of exposing these claims, and of rebuking them. His preface to the transcript gives evidence of this. The glee with which he pointed to it when it first appeared was no less significant.

  At Villers, in 1875, he only corrected the proofs of ‘The Inn Album’ for publication in November. When the party started for the Isle of Arran, in the autumn of 1876, the ‘Pacchiarotto’ volume had already appeared.

  When Mr. Browning discontinued his short-lived habit of visiting away from home, he made an exception in favour of the Universities. His occasional visits to Oxford and Cambridge were maintained till the very end of his life, with increasing frequency in the former case; and the days spent at Balliol and Trinity afforded him as unmixed a pleasure as was compatible with the interruption of his daily habits, and with a system of hospitality which would detain him for many hours at table. A vivid picture of them is given in two letters, dated January 20 and March 10, 1877, and addressed to one of his constant correspondents, Mrs. Fitz-Gerald, of Shalsto
ne Manor, Buckingham.

  Dear Friend, I have your letter of yesterday, and thank you all I can for its goodness and graciousness to me unworthy . . . I returned on Thursday — the hospitality of our Master being not easy to set aside. But to begin with the beginning: the passage from London to Oxford was exceptionally prosperous — the train was full of men my friends. I was welcomed on arriving by a Fellow who installed me in my rooms, — then came the pleasant meeting with Jowett who at once took me to tea with his other guests, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Bishop of London, Dean of Westminster, the Airlies, Cardwells, male and female. Then came the banquet — (I enclose you the plan having no doubt that you will recognise the name of many an acquaintance: please return it) — and, the dinner done, speechifying set in vigorously. The Archbishop proposed the standing ‘Floreat domus de Balliolo’ — to which the Master made due and amusing answer, himself giving the health of the Primate. Lord Coleridge, in a silvery speech, drank to the University, responded to by the Vice-Chancellor. I forget who proposed the visitors — the Bishop of London, perhaps Lord Cardwell. Professor Smith gave the two Houses of Parliament, — Jowett, the Clergy, coupling with it the name of your friend Mr. Rogers — on whom he showered every kind of praise, and Mr. Rogers returned thanks very characteristically and pleasantly. Lord Lansdowne drank to the Bar (Mr. Bowen), Lord Camperdown to — I really forget what: Mr. Green to Literature and Science delivering a most undeserved eulogium on myself, with a more rightly directed one on Arnold, Swinburne, and the old pride of Balliol, Clough: this was cleverly and almost touchingly answered by dear Mat Arnold. Then the Dean of Westminster gave the Fellows and Scholars — and then — twelve o’clock struck. We were, counting from the time of preliminary assemblage, six hours and a half engaged: fully five and a half nailed to our chairs at the table: but the whole thing was brilliant, genial, and suggestive of many and various thoughts to me — and there was a warmth, earnestness, and yet refinement about it which I never experienced in any previous public dinner. Next morning I breakfasted with Jowett and his guests, found that return would be difficult: while as the young men were to return on Friday there would be no opposition to my departure on Thursday. The morning was dismal with rain, but after luncheon there was a chance of getting a little air, and I walked for more than two hours, then heard service in New Coll. — then dinner again: my room had been prepared in the Master’s house. So, on Thursday, after yet another breakfast, I left by the noon-day train, after all sorts of kindly offices from the Master. . . . No reporters were suffered to be present — the account in yesterday’s Times was furnished by one or more of the guests; it is quite correct as far as it goes. There were, I find, certain little paragraphs which must have been furnished by ‘guessers’: Swinburne, set down as present — was absent through his Father’s illness: the Cardinal also excused himself as did the Bishop of Salisbury and others. . . . Ever yours R. Browning.