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his life had withdrawn: but there was still music for one to whom life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 Hallé, 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 Baliol 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 Guérande 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, "Hervé 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." "Hervé 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 Personæ," 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 Dæmonum_, because it filleth the
imagination. Certainly if it be not _vinum dæmonum_ 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.[23] 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.
[Footnote 23: 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 æsthetic 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."
One drawback to an unconditional enjoyment of Balzac is that every now
and again the student of the _Comédie Humaine_ resents the too obvious
display of the forces that propel the effect--a lesser phase of the
weariness which ensues upon much reading of the mere "human documents"
of the Goncourt school of novelists. In the same way, we too often see
Browning working up the electrical qualities, so that, when the
fulmination comes, we understand "just how it was produced," and, as
illogically as children before a too elaborate conjurer, conclude that
there is not so much in this particular poetic feat as in others which,
like Herrick's maids, continually do deceive. To me this is affirmable
of "Fifine at the Fair." The poet seems to know so very well what he is
doing. If he did not take the reader so much into his confidence, if he
would rely more upon the liberal grace of his earlier verse and less
upon the trained subtlety of his athletic intellect, the charm would be
the greater. The poem would have a surer duration as one of the author's
greater achievements, if there were more frequent and more prolonged
insistence on the note struck in the lines (§ lxxiii.) about the
hill-stream, infant of mist and dew, falling over the ledge of the
fissured cliff to find its fate in smoke below, as it disappears into
the deep, "embittered evermore, to make the sea one drop more big
thereby:" or in the cloudy splendour of the description of nightfall (§
cvi.): or in the windy spring freshness of
"Hence, when the earth began afresh its life in May,
And fruit-trees bloomed, and waves would wanton, and the bay
Ruffle its wealth of weed, and stranger-birds arrive,
And beasts take each a mate." ...
But its chief fault seems to me to be its lack of that transmutive glow
of rhythmic emotion without which no poem can endure. This rhythmic
energy is, inherently, a distinct thing from intellectual emotion.
Metric music may be alien to the adequate expression of the latter,
whereas rhythmic emotion can have no other appropriate issue. Of course,
in a sense, all creative art is rhythmic in kind: but here I am speaking
only of that creative energy which evolves the germinal idea through the
medium of language. The energy of the intellect under creative stimulus
may produce lordly issues in prose: but poetry of a high intellectual
order can be the outcome only of an intellect fused to white heat, of
intellectual emotion on fire--as, in the fine saying of George Meredith,
passion is noble strength on fire. Innumerable examples could be taken
from any part of the poem, but as it would not be just to select the
most obviously defective passages, here are two which are certainly
fairly representative of the general level--
"And I became aware, scarcely the word escaped my lips, that swift
ensued in silence and by stealth, and yet with certitude, a
formidable change of the amphitheatre which held the Carnival;
_although the human stir continued just the same amid that shift
of scene_." (No. CV.)
"And where i' the world is all this wonder, you detail so
trippingly, espied? My mirror would reflect a tall, thin, pale,
deep-eyed personage, pretty once, it may be, doubtless still
loving--certain grace yet lingers if you will--but all this
wonder, where?" (No. XL.)
Here, and in a hundred other such passages, we have the rhythm, if not
of the best prose, at least not that of poetry. Will "Fifine" and poems
of its kind stand re-reading, re-perusal over and over? That is one of
the most definite tests. In the pressure of life can we afford much time
to anything but the very best--nay, to the vast mass even of that which
closely impinges thereupon?
For myself, in the instance of "Fifine," I admit that if re-perusal be
controlled by pleasure I am content (always excepting a few scattered
noble passages) with the Prologue and Epilogue. A little volume of those
Summaries of Browning's--how stimulating a companion it would be in
those hours when the mind would fain breathe a more liberal air!
As for "Jocoseria,"[24] it seems to me the poorest of Browning's works,
and I cannot help thinking that ultimately the only gold grain
discoverable therein will be "Ixion," the beautiful penultimate poem
beginning--
"Never the time and the place
And the loved one altogether;"
and the thrush-like overture, closing--
"What of the leafage, what of the flower?
Roses embowering with nought they embower!
Come then! complete incompletion, O comer,
Pant through the blueness, perfect the summer!
Breathe but one breath
Rose-beauty above,
And all that was death
Grows life, grows love,
Grows love!"
[Footnote 24: In a letter to a friend, along with an early copy of this
book, Browning stated that "the title is taken from the work of Melander
(_Schwartzmann_), reviewed, by a curious coincidence, in the
_Blackwood_ of this month. I referred to it in a note to 'Paracelsus.'
The two Hebrew quotations (put in to give a grave look to what is mere fun
and invention) being translated amount to (1) 'A Collection of Many Lies':
and (2), an old saying, 'From Moses to Moses arose none like Moses'......"]
In 1881 the "Browning Society" was established. It is easy to ridicule
any institution of the kind--much easier than to be considerate of other
people's earnest convictions and aims, or to be helpful to their object.
There is always a ridiculous side to excessive enthusiasm, particularly
obvious to persons incapable of enthusiasm of any kind. With some
mistakes, and not a few more or less grotesque absurdities, the members
of the various English and American Browning Societies are yet to be
congratulated on the good work they have, collectively, accomplished.
Their publications are most interesting and suggestive: ultimately they
will be invaluable. The members have also done a good work in causing
some of Browning's plays to be produced again on the stage, and in Miss
Alma Murray and others have found sympathetic and able exponents of some
of the poet's most attractive _dramatis personæ_. There can be no
question as to the powerful impetus given by the Society to Browning's
steadily-increasing popularity. Nothing shows his judicious good sense
more than the letter he wrote, privately, to Mr. Edmund Yates, at the
time of the Society's foundation.
"The Browning Society, I need not say, as well as Browning
himself, are fair game for criticism. I had no more to do with the
founding it than the babe unborn; and, as Wilkes was no Wilkeite,
I am quite other than a Browningite. But I cannot wish harm to a
society of, with a few exceptions, names unknown to me, who are
busied about my books so disinterestedly. The exaggerations
probably come of the fifty-years'-long charge of unintelligibility
against my books; such reactions are possible, though I never
looked for the beginning of one so soon. That there is a grotesque
side to the thing is certain; but I have been surprised and
touched by what cannot but have been well intentioned, I think.
Anyhow, as I never felt inconvenienced by hard words, you will not
expect me to wax bumptious because of undue compliment: so enough
of 'Browning,'--except that he is yours very truly, 'while this
machine is to him.'"
The latter years of the poet were full of varied interest for himself,
but present little of particular significance for specification in a
monograph so concise as this must perforce be. Every year he went
abroad, to France or to Italy, and once or twice on a yachting trip in
the Mediterranean.[25] At home--for many years, at 19 Warwick Crescent,
in what some one has called the dreary Mesopotamia of Paddington, and
for the last three or four years of his life at 29 De Vere Gardens,
Kensington Gore--his avocations were so manifold that it is difficult to
understand where he had leisure for his vocation. Everybody wished him
to come to dine; and he did his utmost to gratify Everybody. He saw
everything; read all the notable books; kept himself acquainted with the
leading contents of the journals and magazines; conducted a large
correspondence; read new French, German, and Italian books of mark; read
and translated Euripides and Æschylus; knew all the gossip of the
literary clubs, salons, and the studios; was a frequenter of
afternoon-tea parties; and then, over and above it, he was Browning: the
most profoundly subtle mind that has exercised itself in poetry since
Shakspere. His personal grace and charm of manner never failed. Whether
he was dedicating "Balaustion's Adventure" in terms of gracious
courtesy, or handing a flower from some jar of roses, or lilies, or his
favourite daffodils, with a bright smile or merry glance, to the lady of
his regard, or when sending a copy of a new book of poetry with an
accompanying letter expressed with rare felicity, or when generously
prophesying for a young poet the only true success if he will but listen
and act upon "the inner voice,"--he was in all these, and in all things,
the ideal gentleman. There is so charming and characteristic a touch in
the following note to a girl-friend, that I must find room for it:--
29 De Vere Gardens, W.,
_6th July_ 1889.
MY BELOVED ALMA,--I had the honour yesterday of dining with the
Shah, whereupon the following dialogue:--
"Vous êtes poëte?"
"On s'est permis de me le dire quelquefois."
"Et vous avez fait des livres?"
"Trop de livres."
"Voulez-vous m'en donner un, afin que je puisse me ressouvenir de
vous?"
"Avec plaisir."
I have been accordingly this morning to town, where the thing is
procurable, and as I chose a volume of which I judged the binding
might take the imperial eye, I said to myself, "Here do I present
my poetry to a personage for whom I do not care three straws; why
should I not venture to do as much for a young lady I love dearly,
who, for the author's sake, will not impossibly care rather for
the inside than the outside of the volume?" So I was bold enough
to take one and offer it for your kind acceptance, begging you to
remember in days to come that the author, whether a good poet or
no, was always, my Alma, your affectionate friend,
ROBERT BROWNING.
[Footnote 25: It was on his first experience of this kind, more than a
quarter of a century earlier, that he wrote the nobly patriotic lines of
"Home Thoughts from the Sea," and that flawless strain of bird-music,
"Home Thoughts from Abroad:" then, also, that he composed "How they
brought the Good News." Concerning the last, he wrote, in 1881 (_vide
The Academy_, April 2nd), "There is no sort of historical foundation
about [this poem]. I wrote it under the bulwark of a vessel off the
African coast, after I had been at it long enough to appreciate even the
fancy of a gallop on the back of a certain good horse, 'York,' then in
my stable at home. It was written in pencil on the fly-leaf of Bartoli's
_Simboli_, I remember."]
His look was a continual and serene gleam. Lamartine, who remarks this
of Bossuet in his youth, adds a phrase which, as observant acquaintances
of the poet will agree, might be written of Browning--"His lips quivered
often without utterance, as if with the wind of an internal speech."
Except for the touching and beautiful letter which he wrote from Asolo
about two months before his death, to Mr. Wilfrid Meynell, about a young
writer to whom the latter wished to draw the poet's kindly attention--a
letter which has a peculiar pathos in the words, "I shall soon depart
for Venice, on my way homeward"--except for this letter there is none so
well worth repetition here as his last word to the Poet-Laureate. The
friendship between these two great poets has in itself the fragrance of
genius. The letter was written just before Browning left London.
29 De Vere Gardens, W.,
_August 5th_, 1889.
MY DEAR TENNYSON,--To-morrow is your birthday--indeed, a memorable
one. Let me say I associate myself with the universal pride of our
country in your glory, and in its hope that for many and many a
year we may have your very self among us--secure that your poetry
will be a wonder and delight to all those appointed to come after.
And for my own part, let me further say, I have loved you dearly.
May God bless you and yours.
At no moment from first to last of my acquaintance with your
works, or friendship with yourself, have I had any other feeling,
expressed or kept silent, than this which an opportunity allows me
to utter--that I am and ever shall be, my dear Tennyson,
admiringly and affectionately yours,
ROBERT BROWNING.
Shortly after this he was at Asolo once more, the little hill-town in
the Veneto, which he had visited in his youth, and where he heard again
the echo of Pippa's song--
"God's in His heaven,
All's right with the world!"
Mr. W.W. Story writes to me that he spent three days with the poet at
this time, and that the latter seemed, except for a slight asthma, to be
as vigorous in mind and body as ever. Thence, later in the autumn, he
went to Venice, to join his son and daughter-in-law at the home where he
was "to have a corner for his old age," the beautiful Palazzo Rezzonico,
on the Grand Canal. He was never happier, more sanguine, more joyous,
than here. He worked for three or four hours each morning, walked daily
for about two hours, crossed occasionally to the Lido with his sister,
and in the evenings visited friends or went to the opera. But for some
time past, his heart--always phenomenally slow in its action, and of
late ominously intermittent--had been noticeably weaker. As he suffered
no pain and little inconvenience, he paid no particular attention to the
matter. Browning had as little fear of death as doubt in God. In a
controlling Providence he did indeed profoundly believe. He felt, with
Joubert, that "it is not difficult to believe in God, if one does not
worry oneself to define Him."[26]
[Footnote 26: "Browning's 'orthodoxy' brought him into many a combat
with his rationalistic friends, some of whom could hardly believe that
he took his doctrine seriously. Such was the fact, however; indeed, I
have heard that he once stopped near an open-air assembly which an
atheist was haranguing, and, in the freedom of his _incognito_, gave
strenuous battle to the opinions uttered. To one who had spoken of an
expected 'Judgment Day' as a superstition, I heard him say: 'I don't see
that. Why should there not be a settling day in the universe, as when a
master settles with his workmen at the end of the week?' There was
something in his tone and manner which suggested his dramatic conception
of religious ideas and ideals."--MONCURE D. CONWAY.]
"How should externals satisfy my soul?" was his cry in "Sordello," and
it was the fundamental strain of all his poetry, as the fundamental
motive is expressible in
"--a loving worm within its sod
Were diviner than a loveless god
Amid his worlds"--
love being with him the golden key wherewith to unlock the world of the
universe, of the soul, of all nature. He is as convinced of the two
absolute facts of God and Soul as Cardinal Newman in writing of "Two and
two only, supreme and luminously self-evident beings, myself and my
Creator." Most fervently he believes that
"Haply for us the ideal dawn shall break ...
And set our pulse in tune with moods divine"--
though, co-equally, in the necessity of "making man sole sponsor of
himself." Ever and again, of course, he was betrayed by the bewildering
and defiant puzzle of life: seeing in the face of the child the seed of
sorrow, "in the green tree an ambushed flame, in Phosphor a vaunt-guard
of Night." Yet never of him could be written that thrilling saying which
Sainte-Beuve uttered of Pascal, "That lost traveller who yearns for
home, who, strayed without a guide in a dark forest, takes many times
the wrong road, goes, returns upon his steps, is discouraged, sits down
at a crossing of the roads, utters cries to which no one responds,
resumes his march with frenzy and pain, throws himself upon the ground
and wants to die, and reaches home at last only after all sorts of
anxieties and after sweating blood." No darkness, no tempest, no gloom,
long confused his vision of 'the ideal dawn.' As the carrier-dove is
often baffled, yet ere long surely finds her way through smoke and fog
and din to her far country home, so he too, however distraught, soon or
late soared to untroubled ether. He had that profound inquietude, which
the great French critic says 'attests a moral nature of a high rank, and
a mental nature stamped with the seal of the archangel.' But, unlike
Pascal--who in Sainte-Beuve's words exposes in the human mind itself
two abysses, "on one side an elevation toward God, toward the morally
beautiful, a return movement toward an illustrious origin, and on the
other side an abasement in the direction of evil"--Browning sees,
believes in, holds to nothing short of the return movement, for one and
all, toward an illustrious origin.
The crowning happiness of a happy life was his death in the city he
loved so well, in the arms of his dear ones, in the light of a
world-wide fame. The silence to which the most eloquent of us must all
one day lapse came upon him like the sudden seductive twilight of the
Tropics, and just when he had bequeathed to us one of his finest
utterances.
It seems but a day or two ago that the present writer heard from the
lips of the dead poet a mockery of death's vanity--a brave assertion of
the glory of life. "Death, death! It is this harping on death I despise
so much," he remarked with emphasis of gesture as well as of speech--the
inclined head and body, the right hand lightly placed upon the
listener's knee, the abrupt change in the inflection of the voice, all
so characteristic of him---"this idle and often cowardly as well as
ignorant harping! Why should we not change like everything else? In
fiction, in poetry, in so much of both, French as well as English, and,
I am told, in American art and literature, the shadow of death--call it
what you will, despair, negation, indifference--is upon us. But what
fools who talk thus! Why, _amico mio_, you know as well as I that
death is life, just as our daily, our momentarily dying body is none the
less alive and ever recruiting new forces of existence. Without death,
which is our crapelike churchyardy word for change, for growth, there could
be no prolongation of that which we call life. Pshaw! it is foolish to
argue upon such a thing even. For myself, I deny death as an end of
everything. Never say of me that I am dead!"
On the evening of Thursday, the 12th of December (1889), he was in bed,
with exceeding weakness. In the centre of the lofty ceiling of the room
in which he lay, and where it had been his wont to work, there is a
painting by his son. It depicts an eagle struggling with a serpent, and
is illustrative of a superb passage in Shelley's "Revolt of Islam." What
memories, what deep thoughts, it must have suggested; how significant,
to us, the circumstance! But weak as the poet was, he yet did not see
the shadow which had begun to chill the hearts of the watchers. Shortly
before the great bell of San Marco struck ten, he turned and asked if
any news had come concerning "Asolando," published that day. His son
read him a telegram from the publishers, telling how great the demand
was and how favourable were the advance-articles in the leading papers.
The dying poet smiled and muttered, "How gratifying!" When the last toll
of St. Mark's had left a deeper stillness than before, those by the
bedside saw a yet profounder silence on the face of him whom they loved.
* * * * *
It is needless to dwell upon the grief everywhere felt and expressed for
the irreparable loss. The magnificent closing lines of Shelley's
"Alastor" must have occurred to many a mourner; for gone, indeed, was "a
surpassing Spirit." The superb pomp of the Venetian funeral, the solemn
grandeur of the interment in Westminster Abbey, do not seem worth
recording: so insignificant are all these accidents of death made by the
supreme fact itself. Yet it is fitting to know that Venice has never in
modern times afforded a more impressive sight, than those craped
processional gondolas following the high flower-strewn funeral-barge
through the thronged water-ways and out across the lagoon to the
desolate Isle of the Dead: that London has rarely seen aught more solemn
than the fog-dusked Cathedral spaces, echoing at first with the slow
tramp of the pall-bearers, and then with the sweet aerial music swaying
upward the loved familiar words of the 'Lyric Voice' hushed so long
before. Yet the poet was as much honoured by those humble friends,
Lambeth artizans and a few poor working-women, who threw sprays of
laurel before the hearse--by that desolate, starving, woe-weary
gentleman, shivering in his threadbare clothes, who seemed transfixed
with a heart-wrung though silent emotion, ere he hurriedly drew from his
sleeve a large white chrysanthemum, and throwing it beneath the coffin
as it was lifted inward, disappeared in the crowd, which closed again
like the sea upon this lost wandering wave.
Who would not honour this mighty dead? All who could be present were
there, somewhere in the ancient Abbey. One of the greatest, loved and
admired by the dead poet, had already put the mourning of many into the
lofty dignity of his verse:--
"Now dumb is he who waked the world to speak,
And voiceless hangs the world beside his bier,
Our words are sobs, our cry of praise a tear:
We are the smitten mortal, we the weak.
We see a spirit on Earth's loftiest peak
Shine, and wing hence the way he makes more clear:
See a great Tree of Life that never sere
Dropped leaf for aught that age or storms might wreak:
Such ending is not Death: such living shows
What wide illumination brightness sheds
From one big heart--to conquer man's old foes:
The coward, and the tyrant, and the force
Of all those weedy monsters raising heads
When Song is murk from springs of turbid source."[27]
[Footnote 27: George Meredith.]
One word more of "light and fleeting shadow." In the greatness of his
nature he must be ranked with Milton, Defoe, and Scott. His very
shortcomings, such as they were, were never baneful growths, but mere
weeds, with a certain pleasant though pungent savour moreover, growing
upon a rich, an exuberant soil. Pluck one of the least lovely--rather
call it the unworthy arrow shot at the body of a dead comrade, so
innocent of ill intent: yet it too has a beauty of its own, for the
shaft was aflame from the fulness of a heart whose love had withstood
the chill passage of the years.
* * * * *
On the night of Browning's death a new star suddenly appeared in Orion.
The coincidence is suggestive if we like to indulge in the fancy that in
that constellation--
"No more subjected to the change or chance
Of the unsteady planets----"
gleam those other "abodes where the Immortals are." Certainly, a
wandering fire has passed away from us. Whither has it gone? To that
new star in Orion: or whirled to remote silences in the trail of lost
meteors? Whence, and for how long, will its rays reach our storm and
gloom-beleaguered earth?
Such questions cannot meanwhile be solved. Our eyes are still confused
with the light, with that ardent flame, as we knew it here. But this we
know, it was indeed "a central fire descending upon many altars." These,
though touched with but a spark of the immortal principle, bear enduring
testimony. And what testimony! How heartfelt: happily also how
widespread, how electrically stimulative!
But the time must come when the poet's personality will have the
remoteness of tradition: when our perplexed judgments will be as a tale
of sound and fury, signifying nothing. It is impossible for any student
of literature, for any interested reader, not to indulge in some
forecast as to what rank in the poetic hierarchy Robert Browning will
ultimately occupy. The commonplace as to the impossibility of
prognosticating the ultimate slow decadence, or slower rise, or, it may
be, sustained suspension, of a poet's fame, is often insincere, and but
an excuse of indolence. To dogmatise were the height of presumption as
well as of folly: but to forego speculation, based upon complete present
knowledge, for an idle contentment with narrow horizons, were perhaps
foolisher still. But assuredly each must perforce be content with his
own prevision. None can answer yet for the generality, whose decisive
franchise will elect a fit arbiter in due time.
So, for myself, let me summarise what I have already written in several
sections of this book, and particularly in the closing pages of Chapter
VI. There, it will be remembered--after having found that Browning's
highest achievement is in his second period--emphasis was laid on the
primary importance of his life-work in its having compelled us to the
assumption of a fresh critical standpoint involving the construction of
a new definition. In the light of this new definition I think Browning
will ultimately be judged. As the sculptor in "Pippa Passes" was the
predestinated novel thinker in marble, so Browning himself appears as
the predestinated novel thinker in verse; the novel thinker, however, in
degree, not in kind. But I do not for a moment believe that his
greatness is in his status as a thinker: even less, that the poet and
the thinker are indissociable. Many years ago Sainte-Beuve destroyed
this shallow artifice of pseudo-criticism: "Venir nous dire que tout
poëte de talent est, par essence, un grand _penseur_, et que tout vrai
_penseur_ est nécessairement artiste et poëte, c'est une prétention
insoutenable et que dément à chaque instant la réalité."
When Browning's enormous influence upon the spiritual and mental life of
our day--an influence ever shaping itself to wise and beautiful
issues--shall have lost much of its immediate import, there will still
surely be discerned in his work a formative energy whose resultant is
pure poetic gain. It is as the poet he will live: not merely as the
"novel thinker in verse." Logically, his attitude as 'thinker' is
unimpressive. It is the attitude, as I think some one has pointed out,
of acquiescence with codified morality. In one of his _Causeries_, the
keen French critic quoted above has a remark upon the great Bossuet,
which may with singular aptness be repeated of Browning:--"His is the
Hebrew genius extended, fecundated by Christianity, and open to all the
acquisitions of the understanding, but retaining some degree of
sovereign interdiction, and closing its vast horizon precisely where its
light ceases." Browning cannot, or will not, face the problem of the
future except from the basis of assured continuity of individual
existence. He is so much in love with life, for life's sake, that he
cannot even credit the possibility of incontinuity; his assurance of
eternity in another world is at least in part due to his despair at not
being eternal in this. He is so sure, that the intellectually scrupulous
detect the odours of hypotheses amid the sweet savour of indestructible
assurance. Schopenhauer says, in one of those recently-found Annotations
of his which are so characteristic and so acute, "that which is called
'mathematical certainty' is the cane of a blind man without a dog, or
equilibrium in darkness." Browning would sometimes have us accept the
evidence of his 'cane' as all-sufficient. He does not entrench himself
among conventions: for he already finds himself within the fortified
lines of convention, and remains there. Thus is true what Mr. Mortimer
says in a recent admirable critique--"His position in regard to the
thought of the age is paradoxical, if not inconsistent. He is in advance
of it in every respect but one, the most important of all, the matter of
fundamental principles; in these he is behind it. His processes of
thought are often scientific in their precision of analysis; the sudden
conclusion which he imposes upon them is transcendental and inept."
Browning's conclusions, which harmonise so well with our haphazard
previsionings, are sometimes so disastrously facile that they exercise
an insurrectionary influence. They occasionally suggest that wisdom of
Gotham which is ever ready to postulate the certainty of a fulfilment
because of the existence of a desire. It is this that vitiates so much
of his poetic reasoning. Truth may ring regnant in the lines of Abt
Vogler--
"And what is our failure here but a triumph's evidence
For the fulness of the days?"--
but, unfortunately, the conclusion is, in itself, illogical.
We are all familiar with, and in this book I have dwelt more than once
upon, Browning's habitual attitude towards Death. It is not a novel one.
The frontage is not so much that of the daring pioneer, as the sedate
assurance of 'the oldest inhabitant.' It is of good hap, of welcome
significance: none the less there is an aspect of our mortality of which
the poet's evasion is uncompromising and absolute. I cannot do better
than quote Mr. Mortimer's noteworthy words hereupon, in connection,
moreover, with Browning's artistic relation to Sex, that other great
Protagonist in the relentless duel of Humanity with Circumstance. "The
final inductive hazard he declines for himself; his readers may take it
if they will. It is part of the insistent and perverse ingenuity which
we display in masking with illusion the more disturbing elements of
life. Veil after veil is torn down, but seldom before another has been
slipped behind it, until we acquiesce without a murmur in the
concealment that we ourselves have made. Two facts thus carefully
shrouded from full vision by elaborate illusion conspicuously round in
our lives--the life-giving and life-destroying elements, Sex and Death.
We are compelled to occasional physiologic and economic discussion of
the one, but we shrink from recognising the full extent to which it
bases the whole social fabric carefully concealing its insurrections,
and ignoring or misreading their lessons. The other, in certain aspects,
we are compelled to face, but to do it we tipple on illusions, from our
cradle upwards, in dread of the coming grave, purchasing a drug for our
poltroonery at the expense of our sanity. We uphold our wayward steps
with the promises and the commandments for crutches, but on either side
of us trudge the shadow Death and the bacchanal Sex, and we mumble
prayers against the one, while we scourge ourselves for leering at the
other. On one only of these can Browning be said to have spoken with
novel force--the relations of sex, which he has treated with a subtlety
and freedom, and often with a beauty, unapproached since Goethe. On the
problem of Death, except in masquerade of robes and wings, his eupeptic
temperament never allowed him to dwell. He sentimentalised where
Shakspere thought." Browning's whole attitude to the Hereafter is
different from that of Tennyson only in that the latter 'faintly,' while
he strenuously, "trusts the larger hope." To him all credit, that,
standing upon the frontiers of the Past, he can implicitly trust the
Future.
"High-hearted surely he;
But bolder they who first off-cast
Their moorings from the habitable Past."
The teacher may be forgotten, the prophet may be hearkened to no more,
but a great poet's utterance is never temporal, having that in it which
conserves it against the antagonism of time, and the ebb and flow of
literary ideals. What range, what extent of genius! As Mr. Frederick
Wedmore has well said, 'Browning is not a book--he is a literature.'
But that he will "stand out gigantic" in _mass_ of imperishable work,
in that far-off day, I for one cannot credit. His poetic shortcomings seem
too essential to permit of this. That fatal excess of cold over emotive
thought, of thought that, however profound, incisive, or scrupulously
clear, is not yet impassioned, is a fundamental defect of his. It is the
very impetuosity of this mental energy to which is due the miscalled
obscurity of much of Browning's work--miscalled, because, however remote
in his allusions, however pedantic even, he is never obscure in his
thought. His is that "palace infinite which darkens with excess of
light." But mere excess in itself is nothing more than symptomatic.
Browning has suffered more from intellectual exploitation than any
writer. It is a ruinous process--for the poet. "He so well repays
intelligent study." That is it, unfortunately. There are many, like the
old Scotch lady who attempted to read Carlyle's _French Revolution_,
who think they have become "daft" when they encounter a passage such as,
for example,
"Rivals, who ...
Tuned, from Bocafoli's stark-naked psalms,
To Plara's sonnets spoilt by toying with,
'As knops that stud some almug to the pith
'Prickèd for gum, wry thence, and crinkled worse
'Than pursèd eyelids of a river-horse
'Sunning himself o' the slime when whirrs the breeze--
_Gad-fly,_ that is."
The old lady persevered with Carlyle, and, after a few days, found "she
was nae sae daft, but that she had tackled a varra dee-fee-cult author."
What would even that indomitable student have said to the above
quotation, and to the poem whence it comes? To many it is not the
poetry, but the difficulties, that are the attraction. They rejoice,
after long and frequent dippings, to find their plummet, almost lost in
remote depths, touch bottom. Enough 'meaning' has been educed from
'Childe Roland,' to cite but one instance, to start a School of
Philosophy with: though it so happens that the poem is an imaginative
fantasy, written in one day. Worse still, it was not inspired by the
mystery of existence, but by 'a red horse with a glaring eye standing
behind a dun one on a piece of tapestry that used to hang in the poet's
drawing-room.'[28] Of all his faults, however, the worst is that
jugglery, that inferior legerdemain, with the elements of the beautiful
in verse: most obvious in "Sordello," in portions of "The Ring and the
Book," and in so many of the later poems. These inexcusable violations
are like the larvæ within certain vegetable growths: soon or late they
will destroy their environment before they perish themselves. Though
possessive above all others of that science of the percipient in the
allied arts of painting and music, wherein he found the unconventional
Shelley so missuaded by convention, he seemed ever more alert to the
substance than to the manner of poetry. In a letter of Mrs. Browning's
she alludes to a friend's "melodious feeling" for poetry. Possibly the
phrase was accidental, but it is significant. To inhale the vital air of
poetry we must love it, not merely find it "interesting," "suggestive,"
"soothing," "stimulative": in a word, we must have a "melodious feeling"
for poetry before we can deeply enjoy it. Browning, who has so often
educed from his lyre melodies and harmonies of transcendent, though
novel, beauty, was too frequently, during composition, without this
melodious feeling of which his wife speaks. The distinction between
literary types such as Browning or Balzac on the one hand, and Keats or
Gustave Flaubert on the other, is that with the former there exists a
reverence for the vocation and a relative indifference to the means, in
themselves--and, with the latter, a scrupulous respect for the mere
means as well as for that to which they conduce. The poet who does not
love words for themselves, as an artist loves any chance colour upon his
palette, or as the musician any vagrant tone evoked by a sudden touch in
idleness or reverie, has not entered into the full inheritance of the
sons of Apollo. The writer cannot aim at beauty, that which makes
literature and art, without this heed--without, rather, this creative
anxiety: for it is certainly not enough, as some one has said, that
language should be used merely for the transportation of intelligence,
as a wheelbarrow carries brick. Of course, Browning is not persistently
neglectful of this fundamental necessity for the literary artist. He is
often as masterly in this as in other respects. But he is not always,
not often enough, alive to the paramount need. He writes with "the verse
being as the mood it paints:" but, unfortunately, the mood is often
poetically unformative. He had no passion for the quest for seductive
forms. Too much of his poetry has been born prematurely. Too much of it,
indeed, has not died and been born again--for all immortal verse is a
poetic resurrection. Perfect poetry is the deathless part of mortal
beauty. The great artists never perpetuate gross actualities, though
they are the supreme realists. It is Schiller, I think, who says in
effect, that to live again in the serene beauty of art, it is needful
that things should first die in reality. Thus Browning's dramatic
method, even, is sometimes disastrous in its untruth, as in Caliban's
analytical reasoning--an initial absurdity, as Mr. Berdoe has pointed
out, adding epigrammatically, 'Caliban is a savage, with the
introspective powers of a Hamlet, and the theology of an evangelical
Churchman.' Not only Caliban, but several other of Browning's personages
(Aprile, Eglamour, etc.) are what Goethe calls _schwankende
Gestalten_, mere "wavering images."
[Footnote 28: One account says 'Childe Roland' was written in three
days; another, that it was composed in one. Browning's rapidity in
composition was extraordinary. "The Return of the Druses" was written in
five days, an act a day; so, also, was the "Blot on the 'Scutcheon."]
Montaigne, in one of his essays, says that to stop gracefully is sure
proof of high race in a horse: certainly to stop in time is imperative
upon the poet. Of Browning may be said what Poe wrote of another, that
his genius was too impetuous for the minuter technicalities of that
elaborate _art_ so needful in the building up of monuments for
immortality. But has not a greater than Poe declared that "what
distinguishes the artist from the amateur is _architectoniké_ in the
highest sense; that power of execution which creates, forms, and
constitutes: not the profoundness of single thoughts, not the richness
of imagery, not the abundance of illustration." Assuredly, no "new
definition" can be an effective one which conflicts with Goethe's
incontrovertible dictum.
But this much having been admitted, I am only too willing to protest
against the uncritical outcry against Browning's musical incapacity.
A deficiency is not incapacity, otherwise Coleridge, at his highest the
most perfect of our poets, would be lowly estimated.
"Bid shine what would, dismiss into the shade
What should not be--and there triumphs the paramount
Surprise o' the master." ...
Browning's music is oftener harmonic than melodic: and musicians know
how the general ear, charmed with immediately appellant melodies,
resents, wearies of, or is deaf to the harmonies of a more remote, a
more complex, and above all a more novel creative method. He is, among
poets, what Wagner is among musicians; as Shakspere may be likened to
Beethoven, or Shelley to Chopin. The common assertion as to his
incapacity for metric music is on the level of those affirmations as to
his not being widely accepted of the people, when the people have the
chance; or as to the indifference of the public to poetry generally--and
this in an age when poetry has never been so widely understood, loved,
and valued, and wherein it is yearly growing more acceptable and more
potent!
A great writer is to be adjudged by his triumphs, not by his failures:
as, to take up Montaigne's simile again, a famous race-horse is
remembered for its successes and not for the races which it lost. The
tendency with certain critics is to reverse the process. Instead of
saying with the archbishop in Horne's "Gregory VII.," "He owes it all
to his Memnonian voice! He has no genius:" or of declaring, as Prospero
says of Caliban in "The Tempest," "He is as disproportioned in his
manners as in his shape:" how much better to affirm of him what Ben
Jonson wrote of Shakspere, "Hee redeemed his vices with his vertues:
there was ever more in him to bee praysed than to bee pardoned." In the
balance of triumphs and failures, however, is to be sought the relative
measure of genius--whose equipoise should be the first matter of
ascertainment in comparative criticism.
For those who would discriminate between what Mr. Traill succinctly
terms his _generic_ greatness as thinker and man of letters, and his
_specific_ power as poet, it is necessary to disabuse the mind of
Browning's "message." The question is not one of weighty message, but of
artistic presentation. To praise a poem because of its optimism is like
commending a peach because it loves the sunshine, rather than because of
its distinguishing bloom and savour. The primary concern of the artist
must be with his vehicle of expression. In the instance of a poet, this
vehicle is language emotioned to the white-heat of rhythmic music by
impassioned thought or sensation. Schopenhauer declares it is all a
question of style now with poetry; that everything has been sung, that
everything has been duly cursed, that there is nothing left for poetry
but to be the glowing forge of words. He forgets that in quintessential
art there is nothing of the past, nothing old: even the future has part
therein only in that the present is always encroaching upon, becoming,
the future. The famous pessimistic philosopher has, in common with other
critics, made, in effect, the same remark--that Style exhales the odour
of the soul: yet he himself has indicated that the strength of Shakspere
lay in the fact that 'he had no taste,' that 'he was not a man of
letters.' Whenever genius has displayed epic force it has established a
new order. In the general disintegration and reconstruction of literary
ideals thus involved, it is easier to be confused by the novel flashing
of strange lights than to discern the central vivifying altar-flame. It
may prove that what seem to us the regrettable accidents of Browning's
genius are no malfortunate flaws, but as germane thereto as his
Herculean ruggednesses are to Shakspere, as the laboured inversions of
his blank verse are to Milton, as his austere concision is to Dante.
Meanwhile, to the more exigent among us at any rate, the flaws seem
flaws, and in nowise essential.
But when we find weighty message and noble utterance in union, as we do
in the magnificent remainder after even the severest ablation of the
poor and mediocre portion of Browning's life-work, how beneficent seem
the generous gods! Of this remainder most aptly may be quoted these
lines from "The Ring and the Book,"
"Gold as it was, is, shall be evermore;
Prime nature with an added artistry."
How gladly, in this dubious hour--when, as an eminent writer has phrased
it, a colossal Hand, which some call the hand of Destiny and others that
of Humanity, is putting out the lights of Heaven one by one, like
candles after a feast--how gladly we listen to this poet with his serene
faith in God, and immortal life, and the soul's unending development!
"Hope hard in the subtle thing that's Spirit," he cries in the Prologue
to "Pacchiarotto": and this, in manifold phrasing, is his
_leit-motif_, his fundamental idea, in unbroken line from the
"Pauline" of his twenty-first to the "Asolando" of his seventy-sixth year.
This superb phalanx of faith--what shall prevail against it?
How winsome it is, moreover: this, and the humanity of his song.
Profoundly he realised that there is no more significant study than the
human heart. "The development of a soul: little else is worth study," he
wrote in his preface to "Sordello": so in his old age, in his last
"Reverie"--
"As the record from youth to age
Of my own, the single soul--
So the world's wide book: one page
Deciphered explains the whole
Of our common heritage."
He had faith also that "the record from youth to age" of his own soul
would outlast any present indifference or neglect--that whatever tide
might bear him away from our regard for a time would ere long flow
again. The reaction must come: it is, indeed, already at hand. But one
almost fancies one can hear the gathering of the remote waters once
more. We may, with Strafford,
"feel sure
That Time, who in the twilight comes to mend
All the fantastic day's caprice, consign
To the low ground once more the ignoble Term,
And raise the Genius on his orb again,--
That Time will do me right." ...
Indeed, Browning has the grand manner, for all it is more that of the
Scandinavian Jarl than of the Italian count or Spanish grandee.
And ever, below all the stress and failure, below all the triumph of his
toil, is the beauty of his dream. It was "a surpassing Spirit" that went
from out our midst.
"One who never turned his back but marched breast forward,
Never doubted clouds would break,
Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would triumph,
Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better,
Sleep to wake."
"Speed, fight on, fare ever There as here!" are the last words of this
brave soul. In truth, "the air seems bright with his past presence yet."
"Sun-treader--life and light be thine for ever;
Thou art gone from us--years go by--and spring
Gladdens, and the young earth is beautiful,
Yet thy songs come not--other bards arise,
But none like thee--they stand--thy majesties,
Like mighty works which tell some Spirit there
Hath sat regardless of neglect and scorn,
Till, its long task completed, it hath risen
And left us, never to return."
* * * * *
INDEX.
A.
"Abt Vogler," 130, 172, 202
"A Face," 130
"A Forgiveness," 130
"After," 130
"Agamemnon of Æschylus," 182
"A Grammarian's Funeral," 129, 168
"A Likeness," 130
Alma ----, Letter to, 191
"Amphibian," 130
Ancona, 150
"Andrea del Sarto," 130, 168
"Andromeda," 25
"Another way of Love," 130
"Any Wife to any Husband," 129, 168
"A Pearl," 130
"Apparent Failure," 130, 172
"Appearances," 130
Appearance, Browning's personal, 74, 161
Aprile, 107, 204, 207
"Aristophanes' Apology," 182
"Ask not one least word of praise," 130
"Asolando," 22, 39, 128, 131, 182, 196, 207, 210
Asolo, 58, 192
"A Soul's Tragedy," 89, 91, 179
"Athenæum, The," 73
"A Toccata of Galuppi's," 130, 168
"Aurora Leigh," 118, 152, 166, 169, 170
B.
Bagni di Lucca, 157, 165
Bailey's "Festus," 114
"Balaustion's Adventure," 182, 190
Balzac, 36, 114, 138, 185, 203, 206
Barrett, Arabella, 54, 174
Barrett, Edward, 136
Barrett, Mr., 144, 161, 170
"Beatrice Signorini," 131
Beautiful in Verse, the, 206-7
Beethoven, 209
"Before," 130
"Bells and Pomegranates," 76, 81, 138
"Ben Karshook's Wisdom," 167
Berdoe, E., 68, 204, 207
"Bifurcations," 130
"Bishop Blougram," 93, 179
Blake, William, 94
"Blot on the 'Scutcheon, A," 79, 88, 89, 90, 91, 206
Bossuet and Browning, 191
Browning, Clara, 21
Browning, Elizabeth Barrett:
Browning's early influence on, 92;
born March 4, 1809, 136;
her girlhood and early work, 136;
death of brother, 136;
residence in London, 137;
"The Cry of the Children," 137;
friendships with Horne and Kenyon, 137;
her appreciation of Browning's poems, 138;
correspondence with him, 138;
engagement, 139;
acquaintance with Mrs. Jameson, 143;
marriage, 145;
Mr. Barrett's resentment, 144;
journey to Paris, 145;
thence to Pisa, 146;
Browning's love for his wife, 146;
"Sonnets from the Portuguese," 147;
in spring to Florence, 150;
to Ancona, _via_ Ravenna, in June, 150;
winter at Casa Guidi, 152;
"Aurora Leigh," 152;
description of poetess, 153, 154;
birth of son in 1849, 157;
"Casa Guidi Windows," 159;
1850, spring in Rome; proposal to confer poet-laureateship on
Mrs. Browning, 159, 161;
1851, visits England, 161;
winter in Paris, 162;
she is enthusiastic about Napoleon III. and interested in Spiritualism;
summer in London, 162;
autumn at Casa Guidi, 162;
winter 1853-4 in Rome, 1856 "Aurora Leigh," death of Kenyon,
legacies, 170;
1857, death of Mr. Barrett, 170;
1858, delicacy of Mrs. Browning, 171;
July 1858, Brownings travel to Normandy; "Two Poems by Elizabeth
Barrett and Robert Browning," 1854, 173;
1860, "Poems before Congress," and death of Arabella Barrett, 160;
"North and South," 174;
return to Casa Guidi, and death on 28th June 1861, 175, 206
Browning, Reuben, 18, 19, 20
Browning, Robert:
born in London in 1812, 11, 13, 19;
his literary and artistic antecedents and contemporaries, 12-14;
his parentage and ancestry, 15, 17-19;
concerning traces of Semitic origin, 15-19;
his sisters, 20;
his father, 18;
his mother, 20, 23;
his uncle, Reuben Browning, 20;
the Camberwell home, 23;
his childhood, 22;
early poems, 25;
translation of the odes of Horace, 26;
goes to school at Peckham, 27;
his holiday afternoons, 27;
"Death of Harold," 29;
criticisms of Miss Flower and Mr. Fox, 30;
he reads Shelley's and Keats's poems, 30, 31;
he has a tutor, 33;
attends Gower Street University College, 34;
he decides to be a poet, 35;
writes "Pauline," 1832, 36;
it is published in 1833, 39;
"Pauline," 39-49;
criticisms thereon, 49;
Rossetti and "Pauline," studies at British Museum, 52, 53;
travels in 1833 to Russia, 57;
to Italy, 58;
return to Camberwell, 1834, 58, and begins "Paracelsus," sonnet
signed "Z," 1834, 60;
love for Venice, 62;
"Paracelsus," 59, 62;
criticisms thereon, 71, 73;
he meets Macready, 73;
"Narses," 76;
he meets Talfourd, Wordsworth, Landor, 77;
"Strafford," 79;
his dramas, 85;
his love of the country, 95;
"Pippa Passes," 96, 98;
"Sordello," 105;
origin of "The Ring and the Book," 1865;
"The Ring and the Book," 113-119;
"The Inn Album," 127;
"Men and Women," 128;
proposed "Transcripts from Life," 129;
"Flower o' the Vine," 131;
correspondence between him and Miss Barrett, 136;
meeting in 1846, 138;
engagement, 140;
marriage, 12th September 1846, 145;
sojourn in Pisa, 146;
they go to Florence, 148;
to Ancona, _via_ Ravenna, 150;
"The Guardian Angel," 150;
Casa Guidi, 152;
birth of son, March 9th, 1849, 157;
they go to Vallombrosa and Bagni di Lucca for the autumn, and winter
at Casa Guidi, 156;
spring of 1850 in Rome, 159;
"Two in the Campagna," 156;
1851, they visit England;
description of Browning, 161;
winter 1851-2 in Paris with Robert Browning, senior, 162;
Browning writes Prefatory Essay to Moxon's edition of Shelley's
Letters, 163;
midsummer, Baths of Lucca, 165;
in Florence, 166;
"In a Balcony," 166;
winter in Rome, 1853-4, 166;
the work written there, 167;
"Ben Karshook's Wisdom," 167;
"Men and Women" published, 168;
Kenyon's death, and legacies to the Brownings, 170;
poems written between 1855-64, 169;
July 1858, Brownings go to Normandy, 173;
"Legend of Pornic," "Gold Hair," 173;
autumn of 1859 in Sienna; winter 1860-61 in Rome, 173;
death of Mrs. Browning, June 1861, 175;
"Prospice," 176;
1866, Browning loses his father;
Miss Sarianna resides with Browning, 177;
his ways of life, 177;
first collected edition of his works, 1868, 178;
first part of "The Ring and the Book" published, 178;
"Hervé Riel," 179;
Tauchnitz edition, 1872, 179;
"Bishop Blougram," 179;
"Selections," 180;
"La Saisiaz," 1877, 180;
"The Two Poets of Croisic," 181;
later works, 182;
"Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau," "Red Cotton Nightcap Country," 182, 183;
"Fifine at the Fair," 183, 184, 185-7;
"Jocoseria," 187;
1881, Browning Society established, 188;
his latter years, 189;
revisits Asolo, 191;
Palazzo Rezzonico, 192;
religious belief, 193;
death, December 12th, 1889, 195, 196;
funeral, 197;
to be estimated by a new definition, 200;
as poet, rather than as thinker, 200;
his love of life, 201;
his, like Bossuet's, a Hebrew genius fecundated by Christianity, 201;
his artistic relations to Death and Sex, 201-3;
where, in standpoint, he differs from Tennyson, 203;
as to quality of his _mass_ of work, 204;
intellectually exploited, 204;
his difficulties, and their attraction to many, 205;
his attitude to the future, influence, and significance, 205-211;
summary of his life-work, 200-212.
Browning, Robert Wiedemann Barrett, 18, 37, 157, 163, 174
Browning, Robert (senior), 18, 20, 32, 33, 37, 38, 159, 173
Browning, Sarianna (Mrs.), 21, 25, 29, 32
Browning, Sarianna (Miss), 20, 177, 188
Browning Society, the, 160, 188
Browning, William Shergold, 18
Byron, 149
"By the Fireside," 130
C.
"Caliban upon Setebos," 172, 207, 209
Camberwell, 20, 27, 33, 38, 54, 58, 61
Carlyle, Thomas, 80, 105, 110, 115, 202, 204
Casa Guidi, 120, 152, 154, 163, 166, 174
"Cavalier-Tunes," 129
"Childe Roland," 203, 205
Chopin, 209
"Christmas Eve and Easter-Day," 159, 179
"Cleon," 130
Coleridge, 208
"Colombe's Birthday," 89-91
"Confessional, The," 129
"Confessions," 130
Contemporaries, literary and artistic, of Browning, 12-14
Conway, Moncure, 15, 193
Cristina, 129
"Cristina and Manaldeschi," 130
Cunningham, Allan, 50, 51
D.
Dante, 93, 106, 107, 150
Death, Browning on, 195, 202, 211
"Death of Harold," 29
"Death in the Desert, A," 129, 172
Defoe, 198
"De Gustibus," 57, 59, 130
Dickens, Charles, 54, 90
"Dîs Aliter Visum," 130, 172
Domett, A. (Waring), 151
Dramas, Browning's, 82-92
"Dramatic Idyls," 57, 182
"Dramatic Romances," 128, 179
"Dramatis Personæ," 127, 171, 179
Dulwich Wood, 62, 95, 98, 104-5
E.
"Earth's Immortalities," 129
"Echetlos," 130
Epics, series of monodramatic, 36
Equator of Browning's genius, the, 178
"Evelyn Hope," 129, 168
F.
Faucit, Miss Helen, 80
"Ferishtah's Fancies," 182
"Fifine at the Fair," 110, 130, 182, 184-7
Flaubert, Gustave, 206
"Flight of the Duchess," 27, 129
"Flower's Name, The," 129, 167
_Flower o' the Vine_, 131
Flower, Miss Sarah (afterwards Adams), 30, 52
Form, Artistic, 206-9
Forster, John, 50, 73, 76
Fox, Mrs. Bridell, 59
Fox, Rev. William Johnson, 30, 50, 51, 52, 54, 73
"Fra Lippo Lippi," 129, 166, 168
Furnivall, Dr., 16, 163
Future, Browning and the, 201-10
G.
Goethe, 114, 203, 207, 208
"Gold Hair," 172, 173
Gordon, General, 69
Gosse, E.W., 81
"Grammarian's Funeral, A," 129, 168
"Guardian Angel, The," 130, 150
H.
"Halburt and Hob," 130
Hawthorne, N., 154-5, 171
"Heap Cassia," etc., 71
Heine, 57, 165
"Heretic's Tragedy, The," 129
"Hervé Riel," 130, 179
Hillard, G.S., 154-6
"Holy Cross Day," 167
"Home Thoughts from Abroad," 57, 129, 157, 189
"Home Thoughts from the Sea," 57, 129, 189
Hood, Thomas, 167
Horne, R.H., 137, 138, 150, 152, 206, 209
Houghton, Lord, 167
"How they brought the Good News," etc., 29, 179, 189
Hugo, Victor, 112, 114
I.
"Imperante Augusto," 131
"In a Balcony," 88, 166, 167, 168, 179
"In a Gondola," 129
"Inapprehensiveness," 131
"In a Year," 130
"Inn Album, The," 70, 101, 113, 127, 182
"Instans Tyrannus," 26
"Italian in England, The," 58
Italian Art, Music, etc.--Influence of, on Browning, 58
Italy, first visit to, 56-7
"Ivàn Ivànovitch," 57, 130
"Ixion," 188
J.
Jameson, Mrs., 143
"James Lee's Wife," 59, 130, 172
Jerrold, Douglas, 109
"Jocoseria," 130, 182, 187
"Johannes Agricola," 59
Joubert, 193
K.
Karshish, Epistle to, 129, 166
Keats, 32, 71, 94, 134, 198, 206
Kenyon, John, 137, 163, 170
"King Victor and King Charles," 89, 91
L.
"Lady and the Painter, The," 131
Lamartine on Bossuet, 191
Landor, W.S., 77-9, 92
"La Saisiaz," 130, 180
"Last Ride Together, The," 130
Le Croisie, 178
Lehmann's, Rudolf, portrait of Browning, 16, 17
_Leit-Motif_, Browning's, 210
Letter to a Girl Friend, 191
"Life in a Love," 130
"Light Woman, A," 130
"Lost Leader, The," 78, 129
"Love among the Ruins," 129, 166, 168
"Love in a Life," 130
"Lover's Quarrel, A," 129
Lowell, J.R., 142
"Luria," 88, 89-92, 179
M.
Macpherson, Mrs., 143-6
Macready, 74-81
"Magical Nature," 130
Manner, Browning's, 211
Marlowe, 114
"Mary Wollstonecraft and Fuseli," 130
"Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha," 130, 168
"May and Death," 130
Mazzini, 58
"Meeting at Night," 129, 158
"Memorabilia," 130, 166
"Men and Women," 127-136, 166, 168, 169, 171, 178, 179, 182
Meredith, George, 123, 124, 186, 198
Meynell, Wilfrid, 191
Montaigne, 207
Mortimer, 201-2
Motive, Browning's fundamental poetic, 210
Mill, John Stuart, 51
Milsand, J., 111
Milton, 49, 92, 133, 198
"Misconceptions," 130
Mitford, Mary, 78
"Muléykeh," 130
Murray, Alma, 188
Music of Browning's verse, 205-10
"My Last Duchess," 129
"My Star," 130
N.
"Narses," 76
"Natural Magic," 120
Nature, Browning's observation of, 96
Nettleship, J., 75, 107
"Never the Time and the Place," 130, 188
Newman, Cardinal, 194
_New Spirit of the Age_, 138
Normandy, the Brownings in, 173
"Now," 131
"Numpholeptos," 130
O.
Obscurity, Browning's, 106, 180
"Old Pictures in Florence," 130
"O Lyric Love," 121, 130, 177
"One Way of Love," 130
"One Word More," 169, 177
Optimism, Browning's, 24 (and _vide_ Summary)
Orion, new star in, 198
Orr, Mrs. Sutherland, 18, 98, 111, 184
Orthodoxy, Browning's, 193
"Over the seas our galleys went," 29
P.
"Pacchiarotto," 128-30, 165, 182, 207, 210
Palazzo Rezzonico, 192
"Pan and Luna," 130
"Paracelsus," 50, 58, 60-72, 85, 106, 107
Paris, the Brownings in, 162
"Parleyings," 182
"Parting at Morning," 158
Pater, Walter, 88
"Pauline," 25, 32, 36, 38-48, 51-54, 85, 128, 208, 210
"Pheidippides," 130
"Pictor Ignotus," 129
"Pied Piper of Hamelin," 75, 129, 179
"Pippa Passes," 24, 32, 45, 58, 59, 70, 92, 95-104, 113
Pisa, 146
"Pisgah Sights," 130
Plato, 95
Poe, E.A., 207
Poems, Early, 25, 26, 27, 28, 71
"Poetical Works," 178
"Poetics," 131
Pompilia, 58, 122-125
"Pope, The," 126
"Popularity," 72
"Porphyria," 59, 66
Portraits of Browning, 16, 17, 53
"Pretty Woman, A," 130
Primary importance, Browning's, 134
"Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau," 165, 182, 183
Profundity, Browning's, 94
"Prospice," 130, 172, 176
R.
Rabbi Ben Ezra, 129, 172
Rawdon Brown, Sonnet to, 107
"Red Cotton Nightcap Country," 110, 182-3
Religious Opinions, 193, etc.
"Rephan," 131
"Return of the Druses, The," 37, 89-91, 206
"Reverie," 131, 207, 210
Richmond, 38
"Ring and the Book, The," 39, 101, 113-128, 177, 182, 203, 205, 210
Romance, Browning and, 105
Rome, the Brownings in, 159, 166
Roscoe, W.C., 70
"Rosny," 131
Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 52-3, 55, 104
"Round of Day, The," 131
Ruskin, J., 23, 129
Russia, Visit to, 58
S.
Sainte-Beuve, 194, 200
"Saul," 129, 167, 168
Schiller, 207
School, Peckham, 27, 33
Schopenhauer, 209, 210
Shortcomings, Browning's artistic, 205
Science, Browning and, 68
Scott, David, 14
Scott, Sir W., 198
"Serenade at the Villa," 130
Sex, Browning's artistic relation to, 202
Shakspere, 36, 85-8, 93, 114, 206, 208, 209, 210
Shelley, 30, 43, 136, 146, 149, 164-5, 172, 196, 203, 205, 209
Shelley Letters, the, 163
"Sibrandus Schafnaburgensis," 143, 167
Skelton, John, 90
"Sludge the Medium," 94, 165
_Songs_--"Nay but you," 129;
"Round us the wild creatures," 130;
"Once I saw," 130;
"Man I am," 130;
"You groped your way," 130;
"Wish me no wish unspoken," 130
Sonnets, Browning's, 58
"Sonnets from the Portuguese," 147, 148
"Sordello," 37, 58, 63, 79, 85, 89, 91, 92, 105-12, 203, 205, 210
Soul, Browning and the, 210-11
"Soul's Tragedy, A," 89, 91, 179
"Speculative," 131
Spiritual influence, Browning's, 200
"St. Martin's Summer," 130
Story, W.W., 154, 171, 192
"Strafford," 62, 75, 79-86, 89, 211
Summary of Criticism, 198-212
Swinburne, A.C., 106
T.
Talfourd, 54, 78
Tauchnitz edition, 179
Taylor, Bayard, 161
Tennyson, Lord, 54, 55, 134, 161, 180, 192
"The Statue and the Bust," 173
"The Tomb at St. Praxed's," 129, 143
"There's a woman like a Dew-drop," 192
Thinker, Browning as, 200
"Through the Metidja to Abd-el-Kadr," 129
"Tokay," 167
"Too Late," 130
"Touch him ne'er so lightly," 130
Tour-de-force, Poetry and, 115
_Transcripts from Life_, 129-131
Traill, H.D., 209
"Two in the Campagna," 130, 159, 160
"Two Poets of Croisic," 130, 181
U.
University College, 33
V.
Venice, 59, 192, 197
"Verse-making," 130
W.
Wagner, 209
Wedmore, F., 204
Westminster Abbey, 196
"What of the Leafage," etc., 188
"Why from the World," 130
Wiedemann, Mr., 18
"Woman's Last Word, A," 129
Women, Browning's, 66
"Women and Roses," 130
Wonder Spirit, Browning and the, 95
Wordsworth, 78, 94, 145, 161
Work, Browning's mass of, 201
Y.
Yates, E., Letter from Browning to, 189
York, the horse, 20, 190
"Youth and Art," 130, 172
Z.
"Z" signed Sonnet, 58
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
BY
JOHN P. ANDERSON
(_British Museum_).
I. WORKS.
II. SINGLE WORKS.
III. CONTRIBUTIONS TO MAGAZINES.
IV. PRINTED LETTERS.
V. SELECTIONS.
VI. APPENDIX--
Biography, Criticism, etc.
Magazine Articles.
VII. CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF WORKS
* * * * *
I. WORKS.
Poems. 2 vols. A new edition. London, 1849, 16mo.
Vol. i.,
Paracelsus;
Pippa Passes, a Drama;
King Victor and King Charles, a Tragedy;
Colombe's Birthday, a Play.
Vol. ii.,
A Blot in the 'Scutcheon, a Tragedy;
The Return of the Druses, a Tragedy;
Luria, a Tragedy;
A Soul's Tragedy;
Dramatic Romances and Lyrics.
The Poetical Works of Robert Browning. Third edition. 3 vols.
London, 1863, 8vo.
Vol. i.,
Lyrics;
Romances;
Men and Women.
Vol. ii.,
Tragedies and other Plays.
Vol. iii.,
Paracelsus;
Christmas Eve and Easter-Day;
Sordello.
The Poetical Works of Robert Browning. 6 vols. London, 1868, 8vo.
Vol. i.,
Pauline;
Paracelsus;
Strafford.
Vol. ii.,
Sordello;
Pippa Passes.
Vol. iii.,
King Victor and King Charles;
Dramatic Lyrics;
The Return of the Druses.
Vol. iv.,
A Blot in the 'Scutcheon;
Colombe's Birthday;
Dramatic Romances.
Vol. v.,
A Soul's Tragedy;
Luria;
Christmas Eve and Easter-Day;
Men and Women.
Vol. vi.,
In a Balcony;
Dramatis Personæ.
Complete works of Robert Browning. A reprint from the latest English
edition. Chicago, 1872-74, 8vo.
Nos. 1-19 of the "Official Guide of the Chicago and Alton R.R. and
Monthly Reprint and Advertiser."
The Poetical Works of Robert Browning. 2 vols. Leipzig, 1872, 8vo.
Vols. 1197, 1198 of the "Tauchnitz Collection of British Authors."
The Poetical Works of Robert Browning. 16 vols. London, 1888-9, 8vo.
Vol. i. contains _Pauline_ and _Sordello_.
Vol. ii., _Paracelsus_ and _Strafford_.
Vol. iii., _Pippa Passes; King Victor and King Charles; The Return of
the Druses; A Soul's Tragedy._
Vol. iv., _A Blot in the 'Scutcheon; Colombe's Birthday; Men and
Women_.
Vol. v., _Dramatic Romances; Christmas Eve and Easter-Day._
Vol. vi., _Dramatic Lyrics; Luria._
Vol. vii., _In a Balcony; Dramatis Personæ._
Vols. viii.-x., _The Ring and the Book_, 3 vols.
Vol. xi., _Balaustion's Adventure; Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau;
Fifine at the Fair_.
Vol. xii., _Red Cotton Night-Cap Country; The Inn Album._
Vol. xiii., _Aristophanes' Apology; The Agamemnon of Æschylus._
Vol. xiv., _Pacchiarotto and how he worked in Distemper, with
other Poems._
Vol. xv., _Dramatic Idyls; Jocoseria_.
Vol. xvi., _Ferishtah's Fancies; Parleyings with Certain People._
II. SINGLE WORKS.
The Agamemnon of Æschylus, transcribed by Robert Browning.
London, 1877, 8vo.
Aristophanes' Apology, including a transcript from Euripides,
being the Last Adventure of Balaustion. London, 1875, 8vo.
Asolando: Fancies and Facts. London, 1890 [1889], 8vo.
Now in seventh edition.
Balaustion's Adventure; including a transcript from Euripides
[i.e., a translation of the "Alcestis"]. London, 1871, 8vo.
Now in third edition.
Bells and Pomegranates. 8 Nos. London, 1841-1846, 8vo.
No. i., _Pippa Passes_, 1841.
No. ii., _King Victor and King Charles_, 1842.
No. iii., _Dramatic Lyrics_, 1842.
No. iv., _The Return of the Druses_, 1843.
No. v., _A Blot in the 'Scutcheon_, 1843.
No. vi., _Colombe's Birthday_, 1844.
No. vii., _Dramatic Romances and Lyrics_, 1845.
No. viii., _Luria_; and _A Soul's Tragedy_, 1846.
Christmas Eve and Easter-Day. A poem. London, 1850, 16mo.
Cleon. _Moxon_: London, 1855, 8vo.
Reprinted in _Men and Women_.
Dramatic Idyls, 2 series. London, 1879-80, 8vo.
The First Series now in 2nd edition.
Dramatis Personæ. London, 1864, 8vo.
Three poems in this book were reprinted from advance copies in the
Atlantic Monthly in vol. 13, 1864, viz., _Gold Hair_, pp. 596-599;
Prospice, p. 694; _Under the Cliff_, pp. 737, 738.
Second edition. London, 1864, 8vo.
Ferishtah's Fancies. London, 1884, 8vo.
Now in third edition.
Fifine at the Fair. London, 1872, 8vo.
Gold Hair: a Legend of Pornic. [London], 1864, 8vo.
Reprinted in _Dramatis Personæ_. Gold Hair appeared in the
Atlantic Monthly, May 1864, and _Dramatis Personæ_ was published
on May 28, 1864.
The Inn Album. London, 1875, 8vo.
Jocoseria. London, 1883, 8vo.
Now in third edition.
La Saisiaz. The Two Poets of Croisie. London, 1878, 8vo.
Men and Women. 2 vols. London, 1855, 8vo.
Pacchiarotto and how he worked in distemper: with other poems.
London, 1876, 8vo.
Paracelsus. London, 1835, 8vo.
Parleyings with Certain People of Importance in their Day. Introduced by
a Dialogue between Apollo and the Fates, etc. London, 1887, 8vo.
Pauline, a Fragment of a Confession. London, 1833, 8vo.
There are only five known copies extant, two of which are in the
British Museum.
A reprint of the original edition of 1833. Edited by T.J. Wise.
London, 1886, 12mo. Four copies were printed on vellum.
The Pied Piper of Hamelin, with 35 illustrations by Kate Greenaway.
London [1889], 4to.
Appeared originally in _Dramatic Lyrics_ (Bells and Pomegranates,
No. III.), 1842.
Prince Hohenstiel--Schwangau: Saviour of Society. London, 1871, 8vo.
Red Cotton Night-Cap Country; or Turf and Towers. London, 1873, 8vo.
The Ring and the Book. 4 vols. London, 1868-69, 8vo.
Now in second edition.
Sordello. London, 1840, 8vo.
The Statue and the Bust. _Moxon_: London, 1855, 8vo.
Reprinted in _Men and Women_.
Strafford: an historical tragedy. London, 1837, 8vo.
[Acting edition for the use of the North London Collegiate School
for Girls.] [London, 1882.] 8vo.
Another edition. With notes and preface by E.H. Hickey, and an
introduction by S.R. Gardiner. London, 1884, 8vo.
Two Poems. By Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning.
London, 1854, 8vo.
These two poems, "A Plea for the Ragged Schools of London," by
Elizabeth B. Browning, and "The Twins," by Robert Browning, were
printed by Miss Arabella Barrett, for a bazaar in aid of a "Refuge
for Young Destitute Girls." "The Twins" was reprinted in "Men and
Women," in 1850.
III. CONTRIBUTIONS TO MAGAZINES, ETC.
Sonnet.--"Eyes, calm beside thee, (Lady couldst thou know!")
Dated August 17, 1834; signed "Z."
(_Monthly Repository_, vol. 8 N.S., 1834, p. 712.)
The King.--"A King lived long ago." Signed "Z."
(_Monthly Repository_, vol. 9 N.S., 1835, pp. 707, 708.)
Reprinted with six fresh lines and revised throughout,
in Pippa Passes (1841).
Porphyria.--"The rain set early in to-night." Signed "Z."
(_Monthly Repository_, vol. 10 N.S., 1836, pp. 43, 44.)
Johannes Agricola.--"There's Heaven above; and night by night." Signed "Z."
(_Monthly Repository_, vol. 10 N.S., 1836, pp. 45, 46.)
_Porphyria_ and _Johannes Agricola_ were reprinted in
"Bells and Pomegranates," No. iii., with the title _Madhouse Cells_.
Lines.--"Still ailing, wind? Wilt be appeased or no?" Signed "Z."
(_Monthly Repository_, vol. 10 N.S., 1836, pp. 270, 271.)
Reprinted revised, in _Dramatis Personae_, 1884, as the first
six stanzas of VI. of "James Lee."
The Laboratory (Ancient Régime).
(_Hood's Magazine_, vol. 1, 1844, pp. 513, 514.)
Reprinted in _Dramatic Romances and Lyrics_ (1845), as the first
of two poems called "France and England."
Claret and Tokay.
(_Hoofs Magazine_, vol. 1, 1844, p. 525.)
Reprinted in _Dramatic Romances and Lyrics_ (1846).
Garden Fancies. I. The Flower's Name; II. Sibrandus Schafnaburgensis.
(_Hood's Magazine_, vol. 2, 1844, pp. 45-48.)
Reprinted in _Dramatis Romances and Lyrics_ (1845).
The Boy and the Angel.
(_Hood's Magazine_, vol. 2, 1844, pp. 140-142.)
Reprinted revised, and with five fresh couplets, in _Dramatic
Romances and Lyrics_ (1845).
The Tomb at St. Praxed's (Rome 15--).
(_Hood's Magazine_, vol. 3, 1845, pp. 237-239.)
Reprinted in _Dramatic Romances and Lyrics_ (1845).
The Flight of the Duchess.
(_Hood's Magazine_, vol. 3, 1845, pp. 313-318.)
Reprinted in _Dramatic Romances and Lyrics_ (1845).
Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley. [A fabrication.]
With an introductory essay, by Robert Browning. London, 1852, 8vo.
---- On the poet, objective and subjective; on the latter's aim;
on Shelley as man and poet. [Being a reprint of the Introductory
Essay to "Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley."] London, 1881, 8vo.
Published for the Browning Society.
---- A reprint of the Introductory Essay prefixed to the volume of
Letters of Shelley. Edited by W. Tyas Harden. London, 1838, 8vo.
Ben Karshook's Wisdom.
(_The Keepsake_, 1856, p. 16.)
May and Death.
(_The Keepsake_, 1857, p. 164.)
Reprinted in _Dramatis Personæ_ (1845).
Orpheus and Eurydice.
F. Leighton. 8 lines. (_Royal Academy Exhibition Catalogue_
1864, p. 13.)
Reprinted in _Poetical Works_, 1868, where it is included in
_Dramatis Personæ_.
Gold Hair.
_See_ note to _Dramatis Personæ_.
Prospice.
_See_ note to _Dramatis Personæ_.
Under the Cliff.
_See_ note to _Dramatis Personæ_.
A selection from the poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
[First series edited by Robert Browning.] 2 series. London, 1866-80, 8vo.
Hervé Riel. (_Cornhill Magazine_, vol 23, 1871, pp. 257-260.)
Reprinted in _Pacchiarotto and other Poems_, 1876.
"Oh Love, Love:" the Lyric of Euripides in his Hippolytus.
(_Euripides. By J.P. Mahaffy_, p. 16.) London, 1879, 12mo.
"The Blind Man to the Maiden said."
(_The Hour will Come_, by _Wilhelmine von Hillern.
From the German by Clara Bell_, vol. ii., p. 174.)
London [1879], 8vo.
Printed anonymously; quoted with statement of authorship in the
_Whitehall Review_, March 1, 1883.
Reprinted in _Browning Society's Papers_, Pt. iv., p. 410.
Ten new lines to "Touch him ne'er so lightly."
(_Dramatic Idyls_, 2nd ser., 1880, p. 149.)
Lines written in an autograph album, Oct. 14, 1880.
(_Century Magazine_, vol. 25, 1882, pp. 159, 160.)
Printed without Mr. Browning's consent. Reprinted in the
_Browning Society's Papers_, Pt. in., p. 43.
Sonnet on Goldoni (dated "Venice, Nov. 27, 1883").
Written for the Album of the Committee of the Goldoni Monument
at Venice, and inserted on the first page.
(_Pall Mall Gazette_, Dec. 8, 1883.)
Reprinted in the Browning Society's Papers, Pt. v., p. 98.
Sonnet on Rawdon Brown (dated Nov. 28, 1883).
(_Century Magazine_, vol. 27, 1884, p. 640.)
Reprinted in the Browning Society's Papers, Pt. v., p. 132.
Paraphrase from Horace.
Four lines, written impromptu for Mr. Felix Moscheles.
(_Pall Mall Gazette_, Dec. 13, 1883, p. 6.)
Reprinted in the Browning Society's Papers, Pt. v., p. 99.
Helen's Tower: Sonnet, dated "April 26, 1870."
Written for the Earl of Dufferin, who built a tower in memory of his
mother, Helen, Countess of Gifford, on his estate at Clandeboye.
(_Pall Mall Gazette_, Dec. 28, 1883, p. 2.)
Reprinted in _Sonnets of this Century_, edited by William Sharp,
1886, and in the Browning Society's Papers, Pt. v., p. 97.
The Founder of the Feast: Sonnet. (Dated "April 5, 1884.")
Inscribed by Mr. Browning in the Album presented to Mr. Arthur Chappell,
director of the St. James's Hall Concerts, etc. (_The World_,
April 16, 1884.)
Reprinted in the Browning Society's Papers, Pt. vii., p. 18.
"The Names." Sonnet on Shakespeare.
Contributed to the "Shaksperian Show-Book" of the Shaksperian Show,
held at the Albert Hall, on May 29-31, 1884.
Reprinted in the _Pall Mall Gazette_, May 29, and in the Browning
Society's Papers, Pt. v., p. 105.
The Divine Order and other Sermons and Addresses,
by the late Thomas Jones. Edited by Brynmor Jones.
With a short introduction by Robert Browning. London, 1884, 8vo.
Why I am a Liberal: Sonnet.
(_Why I am a Liberal_, edited by Andrew Reid. London, 1885, p. 11.)
Reprinted in _Sonnets of this Century_, edited by William Sharp,
1886, and in the Browning Society's Papers, Pt. viii., p. 92.
Prefatory Note to the _Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning_,
1889, dated "Dec. 10, 1887."
To Edward Fitzgerald. "I chanced upon a new book yesterday."
12 lines, dated "July 8, 1889" (_Athenæum_, July 13, 1889, p. 64).
IV. PRINTED LETTERS.
Letter to Laman Blanchard [? April, 1841], dated "Craven Cottage,
Saturday." (_Poetical Works of Laman Blanchard_, pp. 6-8.)
London, 1876, 8vo.
Letters to Henry Fothergill Chorley on his novels Pomfret (1845) and
Roccabella (1860). (_Autobiography, Memoir, and Letters of Henry
Fothergill Chorley_, vol. ii., pp. 25, 26, 169-174.)
Letter to R.H. Horne, dated Pisa, Dec. 4 [1846]. Another dated London,
Sept. 24 [1851], signed Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
(_Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning to R.H. Horne_, 1877,
vol. ii., pp. 182-3, 194-5.) Londen, 1877, 8vo.
Letter to William Etty, R.A., dated "Bagni di Lucea, Sept. 21, 1849."
(_Life of William Etty, R.A. By Alexander_ _Gilchrist_,
vol. ii., pp. 280-81.) London, 1855, 8vo.
Letter to Leigh Hunt (dated "Bagni di Lucca, 6th Oct., 1857").
(_Correspondence of Leigh Hunt, edited by his eldest son_,
vol. ii., pp. 264-267.) London, 1862, 8vo.
Letter to the Editor of _The Daily News_, dated "19 Warwick
Crescent, W., Feb. 9," stating that his contribution to the French
Relief Fund was his publishers' payment for a lyrical poem (Hervé Riel).
(_Daily News_, Feb. 10, 1871.)
Letter to the Editor of _The Daily News_, dated "Nov. 20."
On line 131, "Gave us the doctrine of the enclitic De" of the poem,
_A Grammarian's Funeral_. (_Daily News_, Nov. 21, 1874.)
Letter to the Rev. Alexander B. Grosart, on the Poem of _The Lost
Leader_ and _Wordsworth_, dated "19 Warwick Crescent,
Feb. 24, 1875." (_The Prose Works of William Wordsworth.
Edited by the Rev. A.B. Grosart_, vol. i., p. xxxvii.)
London, 1876, 8vo.
The Lord Rectorship of St. Andrew's. Letter to the Editor of
_The Times_, dated "19 Warwick Crescent, Nov. 19."
(_Times_, Nov. 20, 1877.)
Letter to F.J. Furnivall. (_Academy_, Dec. 20, 1878.)
Letter to Mr. J.O. Halliwell-Phillipps, and printed by the latter in 1881.
Letter to Mr. Charles Kent, dated "29 De Vere Gardens, W.,
28 August, 1889." Accompanied by a presentation copy of the
3rd vol. of the new collective edition of "Poems." (_Athenaeum._.
Dec. 21, 1889, p. 860).
In Berdoe's "Browning's Message to his Time," etc., London, 1890, there
are a number of letters from Browning.
In the new edition of Kingsland's "Robert Browning," London, 1890, there
are several letters from Browning.
V. SELECTIONS.
Selections from the Poetical Works of Robert Browning.
[Edited by J. Forster and B.W. Procter.] London, 1863 [1862], 16mo.
Moxon's Miniature Poets. A Selection from the Works of Robert Browning.
London, 1865, 8vo.
Selections from the Poetical Works of Robert Browning.
2 series. London, 1872-80, 8vo.
Favourite Poems. Illustrated.
Boston, 1877, 16mo.
A Selection from the Works of Robert Browning.
With a memoir of the author, and explanatory notes. Edited by F.H. Ahn.
Berlin, 1882, 8vo. Vol. viii. of Ahn's "Collection of British and
American Standard Authors."
Stories from Robert Browning.
By F.M. Holland. With an introduction by Mrs. Sutherland Orr.
London, 1882, 8vo.
Lyrical and Dramatic Poems selected from the works of Robert Browning.
With an extract from Stedman's "Victorian Poets." Edited by E.T. Mason.
New York, 1883, 8vo.
Selections from the Poetry of Robert Browning.
With an introduction by R.G. White. New York [1883], 8vo.
Pomegranates from an English Garden: a selection from the poems
of Robert Browning.
With introduction and notes by J.M. Gibson. New York, 1885, 8vo.
Select Poems of Robert Browning.
Edited, with notes, by William J. Rolfe and Heloise E. Hersey.
New York, 1886, 8vo.
Lyrics, Idyls, and Romances from the poetic and dramatic works
of Robert Browning.
Boston, 1887, 8vo.
Good and true Thoughts from Robert Browning.
Selected by Amy Cross. New York, 1888, 4to.
Printed in blue ink, and on one side of the leaf.
The Browning Reciter: Poems for Recitation, by Robert Browning
and other writers.
Edited by A.H. Miles. London, 1889, 8vo.
Part of the "Platform Series."
VI. APPENDIX.
BIOGRAPHY, CRITICISM, ETC.
Alexander, William John.
An Introduction to the poetry of Robert Browning.
Boston, 1889, 8vo.