Robert Browning, the poet, was the third of that name. The first Robert
Browning, a man of energy and ability, held an important post in the
Bank of England. His wife, Margaret Tittle, was a Creole from the West
Indies, and at the time of her marriage her property was still in the
estates owned by her father near St. Kitts. When their son, the second
Robert, was seven years of age, his mother died, and his father
afterwards married again. The second wife's ascendency over her husband
was unfortunately exerted against the best interests of the son. His
desire to become an artist, his wish for a university training, were
disregarded, and he was sent instead to St. Kitts, where he was given
employment on his mother's sugar plantations. The breach between Robert
and his father became absolute when the boy defied local prejudice by
teaching a negro to read, and when, because of what his father
considered a sentimental objection to slavery, he finally refused to
remain in the West Indies. The young man returned to England and at
twenty-two started on an independent career as a clerk in the Bank of
England. In 1811 he married Sarah Anne Wiedemann. They settled in
Camberwell, London, where Robert, the poet, was born, May 7, 1812, and
his sister Sarianna in 1814.
Browning's father was a competent official in the Bank and a successful
business man, but his tastes were æsthetic and literary, and his
leisure time was accordingly devoted to such pursuits as the collection
of old books and manuscripts. He also read widely in both classic and
modern literatures. The first book of the _Iliad_ he knew by heart, and
all the _Odes_ of Horace, and he was accustomed to soothe his child to
sleep by humming to him snatches of Anacreon to the tune of "A Cottage
in the Wood." Mr. Browning had also considerable skill in two realms of
art, for he drew vigorous portraits and caricatures, and he had, even
according to his son's mature judgment, extraordinary force and facility
in verse-making. In character he was serene, lovable, gentle,
"tenderhearted to a fault." So instinctively chivalrous was he that
there was "no service which the ugliest, oldest, crossest woman in the
world might not have exacted of him." He was a man of great physical
vigor, dying at the age of eighty-four without ever having been ill.
Browning's mother was the daughter of William Wiedemann, a German who
had settled in Dundee and married a Scotch wife. Mrs. Browning impressed
all who knew her by her sweetness and goodness. Carlyle spoke of her as
"the true type of a Scottish gentlewoman"; her son's friend, Mr. Kenyon,
said that such as she had no need to go to heaven, because they made it
wherever they were; and her son called her "a divine woman." She had
deep religious instincts and concerned herself particularly with her
son's moral and spiritual development. The bond between them was always
very strong, and when she died in 1849 his wife wrote, "He has loved his
mother as such passionate natures can love, and I never saw a man so
bowed down in an extremity of sorrow--never."
Robert Browning's childhood was passed in an unusually serene and happy
home. In _Development_ he tells how, at five years of age, he was made
to understand the main facts of the Trojan War by his father's clever
use of the cat, the dogs, the pony in the stable, and the page-boy, to
impersonate the heroes of that ancient conflict. Latin declensions were
taught the child by rhymes concocted by his father as memory-easing
devices. Stories and even lessons were made intelligible and vivid by
colored maps and comic drawings. Until the boy was fourteen, his
schooling was of the most casual sort, his only formal training being
such as he received in the comparatively unimportant three or four years
he spent, after he was ten, at Mr. Ready's private school. His real
education came, through all his early life, from his home. What would
now be called nature-study he pursued ardently and on his own initiative
in the home garden and neighboring fields. His love for animals was
inherited from his mother and fostered by her. He used to keep, says
Mrs. Orr in her account of his life, "owls and monkeys, magpies and
hedge-hogs, an eagle, and even a couple of large snakes, constantly
bringing home the more portable animals in his pockets and transferring
them to his mother for immediate care." Browning says that his faculty
of observation at this time would not have disgraced a Seminole Indian.
In the matter of reading he was not entirely without advice and
guidance, but was, on the whole, allowed unusual freedom of choice. He
afterwards told Mrs. Orr that Milton, Quarles, Voltaire, Mandeville, and
Horace Walpole were the authors in whom, as a boy, he particularly
delighted. His love for art was established and developed by visits to
the Dulwich picture gallery, of which he afterwards wrote to Miss
Barrett with "love and gratitude" because he had been allowed to go
there before the age prescribed by the rules, and had thus learned to
know "a wonderful Rembrandt," a Watteau, "three triumphant Murillos," a
Giorgione Music Lesson, and various Poussins. His marked early
susceptibility to music is evidenced by an incident narrated by Mr.
Sharp: "One afternoon his mother was playing in the twilight to herself.
She was startled to hear a sound behind her. Glancing round she beheld a
little white figure distinct against an oak bookcase, and could just
discern two large wistful eyes looking earnestly at her. The next moment
the child had sprung into her arms, sobbing passionately at he knew not
what, but, as his paroxysm subsided, whispering with shy urgency: 'Play!
Play!'"
In various ways the boy Robert was noticeably precocious. He could not
remember a time, he said, when he did not rhyme, and his sister records
that as a very little boy he used to walk around the table "spanning out
on the smooth mahogany the scansion of verses he had composed." Some of
these early lines he could recall and he could recall, too, the
prodigious satisfaction with which he uttered them, especially the
sentence he put into the mouth of a man who had just committed
murder--"Now my soul is satisfied." At twelve he had a volume named
_Incondita_ ready for publication. To discerning eyes the little volume
was a production of great promise, dominated though it was by the
influence of his father's idol, Pope, and of his own temporary ruling
deity, Byron. But a publisher was not found, and in later years, at
Browning's request, the two extant manuscript copies of _Incondita_ were
destroyed, along with many others of his youthful poems that had been
preserved by his father.
Browning's early tastes in the realm of poetry were, on the whole,
romantic. "Now here is the truth," he wrote to Miss Barrett, "the first
book I ever bought in my life was Ossian--and years before that the
first _composition_ I ever was guilty of was something in _imitation_ of
Ossian whom I had not read, but _conceived_, through two or three
scraps in other books." But the decisive literary influence was yet to
come. When he was fourteen he happened to see on a bookstall a volume
marked, "Mr. Shelley's Atheistical Poem. Very Scarce"; and he at once
wished to know more of this Mr. Shelley. After a perplexing search his
mother found the desired poems, most of them in first editions, at the
Olliers, Vere Street, London. She took home also three volumes by
another poet, John Keats, who, she was told, was the subject of an elegy
by Shelley. Browning never forgot the May evening when he first read
these new books, to the accompaniment, he said, of two nightingales, one
in a copper-beech, one in a laburnum, each striving to outdo the other
in melody. A new imaginative world was opened to the boy. In
_Memorabilia_ he afterwards recorded the strong intellectual and
emotional excitement, the thrill and ecstasy of this poetical
experience. To Shelley especially did he give immediate and fervid
personal loyalty, even to the extent of endeavoring to follow him in
"atheism" and vegetarianism.
When at fourteen the boy left Mr. Ready's school it was decided that his
further education should be carried on at home under private tutors. He
studied music under able masters, one in thorough-bass, and one in
execution. He played and sang, and he composed spirited settings for
songs. He read voraciously. He took lessons in dancing, riding, boxing,
and fencing, and is said to have shown himself exceptionally active and
vigorous. He kept up his interest in art, and he practiced drawing from
casts. He found time also for various friendships. For Miss Eliza and
Miss Sarah Flower, two sisters, nine and seven years his senior, he had
a deep affection. Both young ladies were gifted in music, and this was
one source of their attractions for the music-loving boy. Miss Sarah
Flower wrote sacred hymns, the best known of which is "Nearer my God to
Thee," and her sister composed music which Browning, even in his mature
years, ranked as of especial significance. Other friends of this period
were Joseph Arnold, afterwards Chief Justice of Bombay, and a man of
great ability; Alfred Domett, a striking and interesting personality
described by Browning in a poem beginning "What's Become of Waring," and
referred to in "The Guardian Angel"; and the three Silverthorne boys,
his cousins, the death of one of whom was the occasion of the poem "May
and Death."
In spite of friends, a beautiful home, and congenial work, this period
of home tutelage does not seem to have been altogether happy. His sister
in commenting on this period said, "The fact was, poor boy, he had
outgrown his social surroundings. They were absolutely good, but they
were narrow; it could not be otherwise; he chafed under them."
Furthermore, the youth, before he had found his real work as a poet, was
restless, irritable, and opinionated; and an ever-present cause of
friction was the fact that there were few subjects of taste on which he
and his father did not disagree. Their poetic tastes were especially at
variance. The father counted Pope supreme in poetry, and it was many
years before he could take pleasure in the form in which his son's
genius expressed itself. All the more noteworthy, then, is the
generosity with which Mr. Browning looked after his son's interests
through the unprofitable early years of his poetic career, a generosity
never lost sight of by the son. Mr. Sharp in his _Life of Browning_
records some words uttered by Mr. Browning a week or two before his
death, which show how permanent was his sense of indebtedness to his
father. "It would have been quite unpardonable in my case," he said,
"not to have done my best. My dear father put me in a condition most
favorable for the best work I was capable of. When I think of the many
authors who have had to fight their way through all sorts of
difficulties, I have no reason to be proud of my achievements.... He
secured for me all the care and comfort that a literary man needs to do
good work. It would have been shameful if I had not done my best to
realize his expectations of me."
After it was determined that Robert should "commence poet," he and his
father came to the conclusion that a university training had many
elements foreign to the aim the youth had set before him, and that a
richer and more directly available preparation could be gained from
"sedulous cultivation of the powers of his mind" at home, and from
"seeing life in the best sense" at home and abroad. Mrs. Orr tells us
that the first qualifying step of the zealous young poet was to read and
digest the whole of Dr. Johnson's _Dictionary_.
Browning's first published poem, _Pauline_, appeared anonymously in
January, 1833, when he was twenty years old. This poem is of especial
autobiographical interest. Its enthusiastic praise of Shelley recalls
his early devotion to that poet, and in many scattered passages we find
references to his own personality or experiences. The following lines
show with what intensity he recreated the lives and scenes in the books
he read:
And I myself went with the tale--a god
Wandering after beauty, or a giant
Standing vast in the sunset--an old hunter
Talking with gods, or a high-crested chief
Sailing with troops of friends to Tenedos.
I tell you, naught has ever been so clear
As the place, the time, the fashion of those lives:
I had not seen a work of lofty art,
Nor woman's beauty, nor sweet nature's face,
Yet, I say, never morn broke clear as those
On the dim clustered isles in the blue sea,
The deep groves and white temples and wet caves;
And nothing ever will surprise me now--
Who stood beside the naked Swift-footed,
Who bound my forehead with Proserpine's hair.
There is true and powerful self-analysis in the lines beginning: