THE TEMPLE BIOGRAPHIES
Edited by Dugald Macfadyen, M.A.
Robert Browning
[Illustration: _Robert Browning, from a portrait in oil, for which he
sat to R.W. Curtis at Venice 1880._]
ROBERT BROWNING
BY EDWARD DOWDEN
LITT.D., D.C.L., LL.D.
PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH LITERATURE IN THE UNIVERSITY OF DUBLIN
1904
If I, too, should try and speak at times,
Leading your love to where my love, perchance,
Climbed earlier, found a nest before you knew,
Why, bear with the poor climber, for love's sake.
--_Balaustion's Adventure_.
Editor's Preface
"In the case of those whom the public has learned to honour and admire,
there is a _biography of the mind_--the phrase is Mr Gladstone's--that
is a matter of deep interest." In a life of Robert Browning it is
especially true that the biography we want is of this nature, for its
events are to be classed rather among achievements of the human spirit
than as objective incidents, and its interest depends only in a
secondary sense on circumstance or movement in the public eye. The
special function of the present book in the growing library of Browning
literature is to give such a biography of Browning's mind, associating
his poems with their date and origin, as may throw some light on his
inward development. Browning has become to many, in a measure which he
could hardly have conceived possible himself, one of the authoritative
interpreters of the spiritual factors in human life. His tonic optimism
dissipates the grey atmosphere of materialism, which has obscured the
sunclad heights of life as effectually as a fog. To see life through
Browning's eyes is to see it shot through and through with spiritual
issues, with a background of eternal destiny; and to come appreciably
nearer than the general consciousness of our time to seeing it steadily
and seeing it whole. Those who prize his influence know how to value
everything which throws light on the path by which he reached his
resolute and confident outlook.
It is almost possible to count on the fingers of one hand the few men
who could successfully write a book of this character and scope. The
Editor believes that, in the present case, one of the very few has been
found who had the qualifications required. Much of the apparent
obscurity of Browning is due to his habit of climbing up a precipice of
thought, and then kicking away the ladder by which he climbed. Dr Dowden
has with singular success readjusted the steps, so that readers may
follow the poet's climb. Those who are not daunted by the Paracelsus and
Sordello chapter, where the subject requires some close and patient
attention, will find vigorous narrative and pellucid exposition
interwoven in such a way as to keep them in intimate and constantly
closer touch with the "biography of Browning's mind."
D.M.
Preface
An attempt is made in this volume to tell the story of Browning's life,
including, as part of it, a notice of his books, which may be regarded
as the chief of "his acts and all that he did." I have tried to keep my
reader in constant contact with Browning's mind and art, and thus a
sense of the growth and development of his genius ought to form itself
before the close.
The materials accessible for a biography, apart from Browning's
published writings, are not copious. He destroyed many letters; many, no
doubt, are in private hands. For some parts of his life I have been able
to add little to what Mrs Orr tells. But since her biography of Browning
was published a good deal of interesting matter has appeared. The
publication of "The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett
Browning" has enabled me to construct a short, close-knit narrative of
the incidents that led up to Browning's marriage. From that date until
the death of Mrs Browning her "Letters," edited by Mr Kenyon, has been
my chief source. My method has not been that of quotation, but the
substance of many letters is fused, as far as was possible, into a
brief, continuous story. Two privately issued volumes of Browning's
letters, edited by Mr T.J. Wise, and Mr Wise's "Browning Bibliography"
have been of service to me. Mr Gosse's "Robert Browning, Personalia,"
Mrs Ritchie's "Tennyson, Ruskin and Browning," the "Life of Tennyson" by
his son, Mr Henry James's volumes on W.W. Story, letters of Dante
Rossetti, the diary of Mr W.M. Rossetti, with other writings of his,
memoirs, reminiscences or autobiographies of Lady Martin, F.T. Palgrave,
Jowett, Sir James Paget, Gavan Duffy, Robert Buchanan, Rudolf Lehmann,
W.J. Stillman, T.A. Trollope, Miss F.P. Cobbe, Miss Swanwick, and others
have been consulted. And several interesting articles in periodicals, in
particular Mrs Arthur Bronson's articles "Browning in Venice" and
"Browning in Asolo," have contributed to my narrative. For some
information about Browning's father and mother, and his connection with
York Street Independent Chapel, I am indebted to Mr F. Herbert Stead,
Warden of "The Robert Browning Settlement," Walworth. I thank Messrs
Smith, Elder and Co., as representing Mr R. Barrett Browning, for
permission to make such quotations as I have ventured to make from
copyright letters. I thank the general Editor of this series, the Rev.
D. Macfadyen, for kind and valuable suggestions.
My study of Browning's poems is chronological. I recognise the
disadvantages of this method, but I also perceive certain advantages.
Many years ago in "Studies in Literature" I attempted a general view of
Browning's work, and wrote, as long ago as 1867, a careful study of
_Sordello_. What I now write may suffer as well as gain from a
familiarity of so many years with his writings. But to make them visible
objects to me I have tried to put his poems outside myself, and approach
them with a fresh mind. Whether I have failed or partly succeeded I am
unable to determine.
The analysis of _La Saisiaz_ appeared--substantially--in the little
Magazine of the Home Reading Union, and one or two other short passages
are recovered from uncollected articles of mine. I have incorporated in
my criticism a short passage from one of my wife's articles on Browning
in _The Dark Blue Magazine_, making such modifications as suited my
purpose, and she has contributed a passage to the pages which close this
volume.
I had the privilege of some personal acquaintance with Browning, and
have several cordial letters of his addressed to my wife and to myself.
These I have not thought it right to use.
E.D.
Contents
CHAPTER I
CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH
Ancestry--Parents--Boyhood--Influence of Shelley--Pauline
CHAPTER II
PARACELSUS AND SORDELLO
Visit to Russia--Paracelsus--His failures and attainments--Sordello, a
companion poem--Its obscurity--Imaginative qualities--The history of a
soul
CHAPTER III
THE MAKER OF PLAYS
New acquaintances--Hatcham--Macready--Strafford--Venice--Bells and
Promegranates--A Blot on the 'Scutcheon--Characters of
passion--Characters of intellect
CHAPTER IV
THE MAKER OF PLAYS--_(continued)_
Women of the dramas--Dramatic style--Pippa Passes--Dramatic Lyrics and
Romances--Poems of Love and of Art
CHAPTER V
LOVE AND MARRIAGE
First letters to Miss Barrett--Meeting--Progress in
friendship--Obstacles--Marriage
CHAPTER VI
EARLY YEARS IN ITALY
Correspondence of R.B. and E.B.B.--Journey to
Italy--Pisa--Florence--Vallombrosa--Italian politics--Casa
Guidi-Friends--Son born--Death of Browning's mother--Wanderings.
CHAPTER VII
CHRISTMAS EVE AND EASTER DAY
Publication--Movements of Religious
Thought--Dissent--Catholicism--Criticism--Difficulties of Christian
life--Imaginative power of the poems--In Venice--Paris--England--Paris
again--Coup d'état
CHAPTER VIII
FROM 1851 TO 1855
Essay on Shelley--New acquaintances--Milsand--George Sand--London--Casa
Guidi--Spiritualism--Mr Sludge the Medium--Baths of
Lucca--Rome--London--Tennyson's Maud
CHAPTER IX
MEN AND WOMEN
Rossetti's admiration--Beauty before teaching--The poet behind his
poems--Isolated poems--Groups--Poems of love--Poems of Art--Poems of
Religion
CHAPTER X
CLOSE OF MRS BROWNING'S LIFE
Paris--Kenyon's death--Legacies--Death of Mr Barrett--Winter in
Florence--Havre--Rome--Louis Napoleon--Landor--Siena--Poems before
Congress--Rome again--Modelling in Clay--Casa Guidi--Death of Mrs
Browning
CHAPTER XI
LONDON: DRAMATIS PERSONAE
Desolation--Return to London--Pornic--Social life--Dramatis
Personae--Poems of music--Poems of hope and aspiration--A Death in the
Desert--Epilogue--Caliban upon Setebos--Poems of Love
CHAPTER XII
THE RING AND THE BOOK
Holiday excursions--Sainte Marie--Miss Barrett dies--Balliol College and
Jowett--Origin of the Ring and the Book--Its Plan--The Persons--Count
Guido--Pompilia--Caponsacchi--The Pope--Falsehood subserving truth
CHAPTER XIII
POEMS ON CLASSICAL SUBJECTS
Saint-Aubin--Milsand--Miss Thackeray--Hervé Riel--Miss
Egerton-Smith--Summer wanderings--Balaustion's Adventure--Aristophanes'
Apology--The Agamemnon
CHAPTER XIV
PROBLEM AND NARRATIVE POEMS
Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau--Fifine at the Fair--Red Cotton Night-Cap
Country--The Inn Album--Pachiarotto and other Poems
CHAPTER XV
SOLITUDE AND SOCIETY
La Saisiaz--Immortality--Two Poets of Croisic--Browning in
society--Daily habits--Browning as a talker--Italy--Asolo--Mountain
retreats--Mrs Bronson--Venice
CHAPTER XVI
POET AND TEACHER IN OLD AGE
Popularity--Browning Society--Public honours--Dramatic Idyls--Spirit of
acquiescence--Jocoseria--Ferishtah's Fancies
CHAPTER XVII
CLOSING WORKS AND DAYS
Parleyings--Asolando--Mrs Bronson--At Asolo--Venice--Death--Place in
nineteenth-century poetry
List of Illustrations
ROBERT BROWNING, _from a portrait in oil, for which he sat to R.W.
Curtis at Venice, 1880, reproduced by kind permission of D.S. Curtis,
Esq. (photogravure)_
MAIN STREET OF ASOLO, SHOWING BROWNING'S HOUSE, _from a drawing by Miss
D. Noyes_
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING, _from a drawing in chalk by Field Talfourd
in the National Portrait Gallery_
ROBERT BROWNING, _from an engraving by J.G. Armytage_
THE VIA BOCCA DI LEONE, ROME, IN WHICH THE BROWNINGS STAYED, _a
photograph_
PORTRAIT OF FILIPPO LIPPI, BY HIMSELF, _a detail from the fresco in the
Cathedral at Prato, from a photograph by Alinari_
ANDREA DEL SARTO, _from a print after the portrait by himself in the
Uffizi Gallery, Florence_
PIAZZA DI SAN LORENZO, FLORENCE, WHERE "THE BOOK" WAS FOUND BY BROWNING,
_from a photograph by Alinari_
THE PALAZZO GIUSTINIANI, VENICE, _from a drawing by Miss N. Erichsen_
SPECIMEN OF BROWNING'S HANDWRITING, _from a letter to D.S. Curtis, Esq._
ROBERT BROWNING, _from a photograph (photogravure)_
THE PALAZZO REZZONICO, VENICE, _from a drawing by Miss Katherine
Kimball_
Chapter I
Childhood and Youth
The ancestry of Robert Browning has been traced[1] to an earlier Robert
who lived in the service of Sir John Bankes of Corfe Castle, and died in
1746. His eldest son, Thomas, "was granted a lease for three lives of
the little inn, in the little hamlet of East Woodyates and parish of
Pentridge, nine miles south-west of Salisbury on the road to Exeter."
Robert, born in 1749, the son of this Thomas, and grandfather of the
poet, became a clerk in the Bank of England, and rose to be principal in
the Bank Stock Office. At the age of twenty-nine he married Margaret
Tittle, a lady born in the West Indies and possessed of West Indian
property. He is described by Mrs Orr as an able, energetic, and worldly
man. He lived until his grandson was twenty-one years old. His first
wife was the mother of another Robert, the poet's father, born in 1781.
When the boy had reached the age of seven he lost his mother, and five
years later his father married again. This younger Robert when a youth
desired to become an artist, but such a career was denied to him. He
longed for a University education, and, through the influence of his
stepmother, this also was refused. They shipped the young man to St
Kitts, purposing that he should oversee the West Indian estate. There,
as Browning on the authority of his mother told Miss Barrett, "he
conceived such a hatred to the slave-system ... that he relinquished
every prospect, supported himself while there in some other capacity,
and came back, while yet a boy, to his father's profound astonishment
and rage."[2] At the age of twenty-two he obtained a clerkship in the
Bank of England, an employment which, his son says, he always detested.
Eight years later he married Sarah Anna, daughter of William Wiedemann,
a Dundee shipowner, who was the son of a German merchant of Hamburg. The
young man's father, on hearing that his son was a suitor to Miss
Wiedemann, had waited benevolently on her uncle "to assure him that his
niece would be thrown away on a man so evidently born to be hanged."[3]
In 1811 the new-married pair settled in Camberwell, and there in a house
in Southampton Street Robert Browning--an only son--was born on May 7,
1812. Two years later (Jan. 7, 1814) his sister, Sarah Anna--an only
daughter--known in later years as Sarianna, a form adopted by her
father, was born. She survived her brother, dying in Venice on the
morning of April 22, 1903.[4]
Robert Browning's father and mother were persons who for their own sakes
deserve to be remembered. His father, while efficient in his work in the
Bank, was a wide and exact reader of literature, classical as well as
modern. We are told by Mrs Orr of his practice of soothing his little
boy to sleep "by humming to him an ode of Anacreon," and by Dr Moncure
Conway that he was versed in mediaeval legend, and seemed to have known
Paracelsus, Faustus, and even Talmudic personages with an intimate
familiarity. He wrote verses in excellent couplets of the eighteenth
century manner, and strung together fantastic rhymes as a mode of aiding
his boy in tasks which tried the memory. He was a dexterous draughtsman,
and of his amateur handiwork in portraiture and caricature--sometimes
produced, as it were, instinctively, with a result that was
unforeseen--much remains to prove his keen eye and his skill with the
pencil. Besides the curious books which he eagerly collected, he also
gathered together many prints--those of Hogarth especially, and in early
states. He had a singular interest, such as may also be seen in the
author of _The Ring and the Book_, in investigating and elucidating
complex criminal cases.[5] He was a lover of athletic sports and never
knew ill-health. For the accumulation of riches he had no talent and no
desire, but he had a simple wealth of affection which he bestowed
generously on his children and his friends. "My father," wrote Browning,
"is tender-hearted to a fault.... To all women and children he is
chivalrous." "He had," writes Mr W.J. Stillman, who knew Browning's
father in Paris in his elder years, "the perpetual juvenility of a
blessed child. If to live in the world as if not of it indicates a
saintly nature, then Robert Browning the elder was a saint; a serene,
untroubled soul, conscious of no moral or theological problem to disturb
his serenity, and as gentle as a gentle woman; a man in whom, it seemed
to me, no moral conflict could ever have arisen to cloud his frank
acceptance of life, as he found it come to him.... His unworldliness had
not a flaw."[6] To Dante Rossetti he appeared, as an old man, "lovable
beyond description," with that "submissive yet highly cheerful
simplicity of character which often ... appears in the family of a great
man, who uses at last what the others have kept for him." He is,
Rossetti continues, "a complete oddity--with a real genius for
drawing--but caring for nothing in the least except Dutch boors,--fancy,
the father of Browning!--and as innocent as a child." Browning himself
declared that he had not one artistic taste in common with his
father--"in pictures, he goes 'souls away' to Brauwer, Ostade, Teniers
... he would turn from the Sistine Altar-piece to these--in music he
desiderates a tune 'that has a story connected with it.'" Yet Browning
inherited much from his father, and was ready to acknowledge his gains.
In _Development_, one of the poems of his last volume, he recalls his
father's sportive way of teaching him at five years old, with the aid of
piled-up chairs and tables--the cat for Helen, and Towzer and Tray as
the Atreidai,--the story of the siege of Troy, and, later, his urging
the boy to read the tale "properly told" in the translation of Homer by
his favourite poet, Pope. He lived almost to the close of his
eighty-fifth year, and if he was at times bewildered by his son's
poetry, he came nearer to it in intelligent sympathy as he grew older,
and he had for long the satisfaction of enjoying his son's fame.
The attachment of Robert Browning to his mother--"the true type of a
Scottish gentlewoman," said Carlyle--was deep and intimate. For him she
was, in his own phrase, "a divine woman"; her death in 1849 was to
Browning almost an overwhelming blow. She was of a nature finely and
delicately strung. Her nervous temperament seems to have been
transmitted--robust as he was in many ways--to her son. The love of
music, which her Scottish-German father possessed in a high degree,
leaping over a generation, reappeared in Robert Browning. His capacity
for intimate friendships with animals--spider and toad and lizard--was
surely an inheritance from his mother. Mr Stillman received from
Browning's sister an account of her mother's unusual power over both
wild creatures and household pets. "She could lure the butterflies in
the garden to her," which reminds us of Browning's whistling for lizards
at Asolo. A fierce bull-dog intractable to all others, to her was docile
and obedient. In her domestic ways she was gentle yet energetic. Her
piety was deep and pure. Her husband had been in his earlier years a
member of the Anglican communion; she was brought up in the Scottish
kirk. Before her marriage she became a member of the Independent
congregation, meeting for worship at York Street, Lock's Fields,
Walworth, where now stands the Robert Browning Hall. Her husband
attached himself to the same congregation; both were teachers in the
Sunday School. Mrs Browning kept, until within a few years of her death,
a missionary box for contributions to the London Missionary Society.
The conditions of membership implied the acceptance of "those views of
doctrinal truth which for the sake of distinction are called
Calvinistic." Thus over the poet's childhood and youth a religious
influence presided; it was not sacerdotal, nor was it ascetic; the boy
was in those early days, as he himself declared, "passionately
religious." Their excellent pastor was an entirely "unimaginative
preacher of the Georgian era," who held fast by the approved method of
"three heads and a conclusion." Browning's indifference to the
ministrations of Mr Clayton was not concealed, and on one occasion he
received a rebuke in the presence of the congregation. Yet the spirit of
religion which surrounded and penetrated him was to remain with him,
under all its modifications, to the end. "His face," wrote the Rev.
Edward White, "is vividly present to my memory through the sixty years
that have intervened. It was the most wonderful face in the whole
congregation--pale, somewhat mysterious, and shaded with black, flowing
hair, but a face whose expression you remember through a life-time.
Scarcely less memorable were the countenances of his father, mother and
sister."[7]
Robert Browning, writes Mrs Orr, "was a handsome, vigorous, fearless
child, and soon developed an unresting activity and a fiery temper." His
energy of mind made him a swift learner. After the elementary lessons in
reading had been achieved, he was prepared for the neighbouring school
of the Rev. Thomas Ready by Mr Ready's sisters. Having entered this
school as a day-boarder, he remained under Mr Ready's care until the
year 1826. To facile companionship with his school-fellows Browning was
not prone, but he found among them one or two abiding friends. As for
the rest, though he was no winner of school prizes, he seems to have
acquired a certain intellectual mastery over his comrades; some of them
were formed into a dramatic _troupe_ for the performance of his boyish
plays. Perhaps the better part of his education was that of his hours at
home. He read widely in his father's excellent library. The favourite
books of his earliest years, Croxall's _Fables_ and Quarles's _Emblems_,
were succeeded by others which made a substantial contribution to his
mind. A list given by Mrs Orr includes Walpole's _Letters_, Junius,
Voltaire, and Mandeville's _Fable of the Bees_. The first book he ever
bought with his own money was Macpherson's _Ossian_, and the first
composition he committed to paper, written years before his purchase of
the volume, was an imitation of Ossian, "whom," says Browning, "I had
not read, but conceived, through two or three scraps in other books."
His early feeling for art was nourished by visits to the Dulwich
Gallery, to which he obtained an entrance when far under the age
permitted by the rules; there he would sit for an hour before some
chosen picture, and in later years he could recall the "wonderful
Rembrandt of Jacob's vision," the Giorgione music-lesson, the
"triumphant Murillo pictures," "such a Watteau," and "all the
Poussins."[8]
Among modern poets Byron at first with him held the chief place. Boyish
verses, written under the Byronic influence, were gathered into a group
when the writer was but twelve years old; a title--_Incondita_--was
found, and Browning's parents had serious intentions of publishing the
manuscript. Happily the manuscript, declined by publishers, was in the
end destroyed, and editors have been saved from the necessity of
printing or reprinting these crudities of a great poet's childhood.
Their only merit, he assured Mr Gosse, lay in "their mellifluous
smoothness." It was an event of capital importance in the history of
Browning's mind when--probably in his thirteenth year--he lighted, in
exploring a book-stall, upon a copy of one of the pirated editions of
Shelley's _Queen Mab_ and other poems. Through the zeal of his good
mother on the boy's behalf the authorised editions were at a later time
obtained; and she added to her gift the works, as far as they were then
in print, of Keats.[9] If ever there was a period of _Sturm und Drang_
in Browning's life, it was during the years in which he caught from
Shelley the spirit of the higher revolt. A new faith and unfaith came to
him, radiant with colour, luminous with the brightness of dawn, and
uttered with a new, keen, penetrating melody. The outward conduct of his
life was obedient in all essentials to the good laws of use and wont. He
pursued his various studies--literature, languages, music--with energy.
He was diligent--during a brief attendance--in Professor Long's Greek
class at University College--"a bright, handsome youth," as a
classfellow has described him, "with long black hair falling over his
shoulders." He sang, he danced, he rode, he boxed, he fenced. But below
all these activities a restless inward current ran. For a time he
became, as Mrs Orr has put it, "a professing atheist and a practising
vegetarian;" and together with the growing-pains of intellectual
independence there was present a certain aggressive egoism. He loved his
home, yet he chafed against some of its social limitations. Of
friendships outside his home we read of that with Alfred Domett, the
'Waring' of his poems, afterwards the poet and the statesman of New
Zealand; with Joseph Arnould, afterwards the Indian judge; and with his
cousin James Silverthorne, the 'Charles' of Browning's pathetic poem
_May and Death_. We hear also of a tender boyish sentiment, settling
into friendship, for Miss Eliza Flower, his senior by nine years, for
whose musical compositions he had an ardent admiration: "I put it apart
from all other English music I know," he wrote as late as 1845, "and
fully believe in it as _the_ music we all waited for." With her sister
Sarah, two years younger than Eliza, best known by her married name
Sarah Flower Adams and remembered by her hymn, written in 1840, "Nearer
my God to Thee," he discussed as a boy his religious difficulties, and
in proposing his own doubts drew forth her latent scepticism as to the
orthodox beliefs. "It was in answering Robert Browning;" she wrote,
"that my mind refused to bring forward argument, turned recreant, and
sided with the enemy." Something of this period of Browning's _Sturm und
Drang_ can be divined through the ideas and imagery of _Pauline._[10]
The finer influence of Shelley upon the genius of Browning in his youth
proceeded from something quite other than those doctrinaire
abstractions--the formulas of revolution--which Shelley had caught up
from Godwin and certain French thinkers of the eighteenth century.
Browning's spirit from first to last was one which was constantly
reaching upward through the attainments of earth to something that lay
beyond them. A climbing spirit, such as his, seemed to perceive in
Shelley a spirit that not only climbed but soared. He could in those
early days have addressed to Shelley words written later, and suggested,
one cannot but believe, by his feeling for his wife:
You must be just before, in fine,
See and make me see, for your part,
New depths of the Divine!
Shelley opened up for his young and enthusiastic follower new vistas
leading towards the infinite, towards the unattainable Best. Browning's
only piece of prose criticism--apart from scattered comments in his
letters--is the essay introductory to that volume of letters erroneously
ascribed to Shelley, which was published when Browning was but little
under forty years old. It expresses his mature feelings and convictions;
and these doubtless contain within them as their germ the experience of
his youth.[11] Shelley appears to him as a poet gifted with a fuller
perception of nature and man than that of the average mind, and striving
to embody the thing he perceives "not so much with reference to the many
below, as to the One above him, the supreme Intelligence which
apprehends all things in their absolute truth--an ultimate view ever
aspired to, if but partially attained, by the poet's own soul." If
Shelley was deficient in some subordinate powers which support and
reinforce the purely poetic gifts, he possessed the highest faculty and
in this he lived and had his being. "His spirit invariably saw and spoke
from the last height to which it had attained." What was "his noblest
and predominating characteristic" as a poet? Browning attempts to give
it definition: it was "his simultaneous perception of Power and Love in
the absolute, and of Beauty and Good in the concrete, while he throws,
from his poet's station between both, swifter, subtler, and more
numerous films for the connexion of each with each, than have been
thrown by any modern artificer of whom I have knowledge." In other words
it was Shelley's special function to fling an aerial bridge from
reality, as we commonly understand that word, to the higher reality
which we name the ideal; to set up an aerial ladder--not less solid
because it is aerial--upon the earth, whose top reached to heaven. Such
was Browning's conception of Shelley, and it pays little regard either
to atheistic theory or vegetarian practice.
A time came when Robert Browning must make choice of a future career.
His interests in life were manifold, but in some form or another art
was the predominant interest. His father remembered his own early
inclinations, and how they had been thwarted; he recognised the rare
gifts of his son, and he resolved that he should not be immured in the
office of a bank. Should he plead at the bar? Should he paint? Should he
be a maker of music, as he at one time desired, and for music he always
possessed an exceptional talent? When his father spoke to him, Robert
Browning knew that his sister was not dependent on any effort of his to
provide the means of living. "He appealed," writes Mr Gosse, "to his
father, whether it would not be better for him to see life in the best
sense, and cultivate the powers of his mind, than to shackle himself in
the very outset of his career by a laborious training, foreign to that
aim. ... So great was the confidence of the father in the genius of his
son that the former at once acquiesced in the proposal." It was decided
that he should take to what an old woman of the lake district, speaking
of "Mr Wudsworth," described as "the poetry business." The believing
father was even prepared to invest some capital in the concern. At his
expense _Paracelsus, Sordello_, and _Bells and Pomegranates_ were
published.
A poet may make his entrance into literature with small or large
inventions, by carving cherry-stones or carving a colossus. Browning,
the creator of men and women, the fashioner of minds, would be a
sculptor of figures more than life-size rather than an exquisite
jeweller; the attempt at a Perseus of this Cellini was to precede his
brooches and buttons. He planned, Mr Gosse tells us, "a series of
monodramatic epics, narratives of the life of typical souls." In a
modification of this vast scheme _Paracelsus_, which includes more
speakers than one, and _Sordello_, which is not dramatic in form, find
their places. They were preceded by _Pauline_, in the strictest sense a
monodrama, a poem not less large in conception than either of the
others, though this "fragment of a confession" is wrought out on a more
contracted scale.
_Pauline_, published without the writer's name--his aunt Silverthorne
bearing the cost of publication--was issued from the press in January
1833.[12] Browning had not yet completed his twenty-first year. When
including it among his poetical works in 1867, he declared that he did
so with extreme repugnance and solely with a view to anticipate
unauthorised republication of what was no more than a "crude preliminary
sketch," entirely lacking in good draughtsmanship and right handling.
For the edition of twenty years later, 1888, he revised and corrected
_Pauline_ without re-handling it to any considerable extent. In truth
_Pauline_ is a poem from which Browning ought not to have desired to
detach his mature self. Rarely does a poem by a writer so young deserve
better to be read for its own sake. It is an interesting document in the
history of its author's mind. It gives promises and pledges which were
redeemed in full. It shows what dropped away from the poet and what,
being an essential part of his equipment, was retained. It exhibits his
artistic method in the process of formation. It sets forth certain
leading thoughts which are dominant in his later work. The first
considerable production of a great writer must always claim attention
from the student of his mind and art.
The poem is a study in what Browning in his _Fifine_ terms "mental
analysis"; it attempts to shadow forth, through the fluctuating moods of
the dying man, a series of spiritual states. The psychology is sometimes
crude; subtle, but clumsily subtle; it is, however, essentially the
writer's own. To construe clearly the states of mind which are
adumbrated rather than depicted is difficult, for Browning had not yet
learnt to manifest his generalised conceptions through concrete details,
to plunge his abstractions in reality. The speaker in the poem tells us
that he "rudely shaped his life to his immediate wants"; this is
intelligible, yet only vaguely intelligible, for we do not know what
were these wants, and we do not see any rude shaping of his life. We are
told of "deeds for which remorse were vain"; what were these deeds? did
he, like Bunyan, play cat on Sunday, or join the ringers of the church
bells? "Instance, instance," we cry impatiently. And so the story
remains half a shadow. The poem is dramatic, yet, like so much of
Browning's work, it is not pure drama coming from profound sympathy with
a spirit other than the writer's own; it is only hybrid drama, in which
the _dramatis persona_ thinks and moves and acts under the necessity of
expounding certain ideas of the poet. Browning's puppets are indeed too
often in his earlier poems moved by intellectual wires; the hands are
the hands of Luria or Djabal, but the voice is the showman's voice. A
certain intemperance in the pursuit of poetic beauty, strange and lovely
imagery which obscures rather than interprets, may be regarded as in
_Pauline_ the fault or the glory of youth; a young heir arrived at his
inheritance will scatter gold pieces. The verse has caught something of
its affluent flow, its wavelike career, wave advancing upon wave, from
Shelley:
'Tis he, I ken the manner of his gait;
He rises on the toe; that spirit of his
In aspiration lifts him from the earth.
The aspiration in Browning's later verse is a complex of many forces;
here it is a simple poetic enthusiasm.
By virtue of its central theme _Pauline_ is closely related to the poems
which at no great distance followed--_Paracelsus_ and _Sordello_. Each
is a study of the flaws which bring genius to all but ruin, a study of
the erroneous conduct of life by men of extraordinary powers. In each
poem the chief personage aspires and fails, yet rises--for Browning was
not of the temper to accept ultimate failures, and postulated a heaven
to warrant his optimistic creed--rises at the close from failure to a
spiritual recovery, which may be regarded as attainment, but an
attainment, as far as earth and its uses are concerned, marred and
piteous; he recovers in the end his true direction, but recovers it only
for service in worlds other than ours which he may hereafter traverse.
He has been seduced or conquered by alien forces and through some inward
flaw; he has been faithless to his highest faculties; he has not
fulfilled his seeming destiny; yet before death and the darkness of
death arrive, light has come; he perceives the wanderings of the way,
and in one supreme hour or in one shining moment he gives indefeasible
pledges of the loyalty which he has forfeited. Shelley in _Alastor_, the
influence of which on Browning in writing _Pauline_ is evident, had
rebuked the idealist within himself, who would live in lofty
abstractions to the loss of human sympathy and human love. Browning in
_Pauline_ also recognises this danger, but he indicates others--the risk
of the lower faculties of the mind encroaching upon and even displacing
the higher, the risk of the spirit of aggrandisement, even in the world
of the imagination, obtaining the mastery over the spirit of surrender
to that which is higher than self. It is quite right and needful to
speak of the "lesson" of Browning's poem, and the lesson of _Pauline_ is
designed to inculcate first loyalty to a man's highest power, and
secondly a worshipping loyalty and service to that which transcends
himself, named by the speaker in _Pauline_ by the old and simple name of
God.
Was it the problem of his own life--that concerning the conduct of high,
intellectual and spiritual powers--which Browning transferred to his
art, creating personages other than himself to be exponents of his
theme? We cannot tell; but the problem in varied forms persists from
poem to poem. The poet imagined as twenty years of age, who makes his
fragment of a confession in _Pauline_, is more than a poet; he is rather
of the Sordello type than of the type represented in Eglamor and
Aprile.[13] Through his imagination he would comprehend and possess all
forms of life, of beauty, of joy in nature and in humanity; but he must
also feel himself at the centre of these, the lord and master of his own
perceptions and creations; and yet, at the same time, this man is made
for the worship and service of a power higher than self. How is such a
nature as this to attain its true ends? What are its special dangers? If
he content himself with the exercise of the subordinate faculties,
intellectual dexterity, wit, social charm and mastery, he is lost; if he
should place himself at the summit, and cease to worship and to love, he
is lost. He cannot alter his own nature; he cannot ever renounce his
intense consciousness of self, nor even the claim of self to a certain
supremacy as the centre of its own sympathies and imaginings. So much is
inevitable, and is right. But if he be true to his calling as poet, he
will task his noblest faculty, will live in it, and none the less look
upward, in love, in humility, in the spirit of loyal service, in the
spirit of glad aspiration, to that Power which leans above him and has
set him his earthly task.
Such reduced to a colourless and abstract statement is the theme dealt
with in _Pauline_. The young poet, who, through a fading autumn evening,
lies upon his death-bed, has been faithless to his high calling, and yet
never wholly faithless. As the pallid light declines, he studies his own
soul, he reviews his past, he traces his wanderings from the way, and
all has become clear. He has failed for the uses of earth; but he
recognises in himself capacities and desires for which no adequate scope
could ever have been found in this life; and restored to the spirit of
love, of trust, by such love, such trust as he can give Pauline, he
cannot deny the witnessing audible within his own heart to a future life
which may redeem the balance of his temporal loss. The thought which
plays so large a part in Browning's later poetry is already present and
potent here.
Two incidents in the history of a soul--studied by the speaker under the
wavering lights of his hectic malady and fluctuating moods of
passion--are dealt with in a singularly interesting and original way. He
describes, with strange and beautiful imagery, the cynical, bitter
pleasure--few of us do not know it--which the intellectual faculties
sometimes derive from mocking and drawing down to their own level the
spiritual powers, the intuitive powers, which are higher than they,
higher, yet less capable of justification or verification by the common
tests of sense and understanding. The witchcraft of the brain degrades
the god in us:
And then I was a young witch whose blue eyes,
As she stood naked by the river springs,
Drew down a god: I watched his radiant form
Growing less radiant, and it gladdened me.
What he presents with such intensity of imaginative power Browning must
have known--even if it were but for moments--by experience. And again,
there is impressive truth and originality in the description of the
state of the poet's mind which succeeded the wreck of his early faith
and early hopes inspired by the voice of Shelley--the revolutionary
faith in liberty, equality and human perfectibility. Wordsworth in _The
Prelude_--unpublished when Browning wrote _Pauline_--which is also the
history of a poet's mind, has described his own experience of the loss
of all these shining hopes and lofty abstractions, and the temper of
mind which he describes is one of moral chaos and spiritual despair. The
poet of _Pauline_ turns from political and social abstractions to real
life, and the touch of reality awakens him as if from a splendid dream;
but his mood is not so sane as that of despair. He falls back, with a
certain joy, upon the exercise of his inferior powers; he wakes suddenly
and "without heart-wreck ":
First went my hopes of perfecting mankind,
Next--faith in them, and then in freedom's self
And virtue's self, then my own motives, ends,
And aims and loves, and human love went last.
I felt this no decay, because new powers
Rose as old feelings left--wit, mockery,
Light-heartedness; for I had oft been sad,
Mistrusting my resolves, but now I cast
Hope joyously away; I laughed and said
"No more of this!"
It is difficult to believe that Browning is wholly dramatic here; we
seem to discover something of that period of _Sturm und Drang_, when his
mood grew restless and aggressive. The homage paid to Shelley, whose
higher influence Browning already perceived to be in large measure
independent of his creed of revolution, has in it certainly something of
the spirit of autobiography. In this enthusiastic admiration for Shelley
there is nothing to regret, except the unhappy extravagance of the name
"Suntreader," which he invented as a title for the poet of _Alastor_ and
_Prometheus Unbound._
The attention of Mr W.J. Fox, a Unitarian minister of note, had been
directed to Browning's early unpublished verse by Miss Flower. In the
_Monthly Repository_ (April 1833) which he then edited, Mr Fox wrote of
_Pauline_ with admiration, and Browning was duly grateful for this
earliest public recognition of his genius as a poet. In the _Athenaeum_
Allen Cunningham made an effort to be appreciative and sympathetic. John
Stuart Mill desired to be the reviewer of _Pauline_ in _Taifs Magazine_;
there, however, the poem had been already dismissed with one
contemptuous phrase. It found few readers, but the admiration of one of
these, who discovered _Pauline_ many years later, was a sufficient
compensation for the general indifference or neglect. "When Mr Browning
was living in Florence, he received a letter from a young painter whose
name was quite unknown to him, asking him whether he were the author of
a poem called _Pauline_, which was somewhat in his manner, and which the
writer had so greatly admired that he had transcribed the whole of it in
the British Museum reading-room. The letter was signed D.G. Rossetti,
and thus began Mr Browning's acquaintance with this eminent man."[14]
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 1: By Dr Furnivall; see _The Academy_, April 12, 1902.]
[Footnote 2: "Letters of R.B. and E.B.B.," ii. 477.]
[Footnote 3: Letter of R.B. to E.B.B.]
[Footnote 4: Dr Moncure Conway states that Browning told him that the
original name of the family was De Buri. According to Mrs Orr, Browning
"neither claimed nor disclaimed the more remote genealogical past which
had presented itself as a certainty to some older members of his
family."]
[Footnote 5: Quoted by Mr Sharp in his "Life of Browning," p. 21, _n_.,
from Mrs Fraser Cockran.]
[Footnote 6: "Autobiography of a Journalist," i. 277.]
[Footnote 7: For my quotations and much of the above information I am
indebted to Mr F. Herbert Stead, Warden of the Robert Browning
Settlement, Walworth. In Robert Browning Hall are preserved the
baptismal registers of Robert (June 14th, 1812), and Sarah Anna
Browning, with other documents from which I have quoted.]
[Footnote 8: _Letters of R.B. and E.B.B_., i. 528, 529; and (for
Ossian), ii. 469.]
[Footnote 9: Browning in a letter to Mr Wise says that this happened
"some time before 1830 (or even earlier). The books," he says, "were
obtained in the _regular way_, from Hunt and Clarke." Mr Gosse in
_Personalia_ gives a different account, pp. 23, 24.]
[Footnote 10: The quotations from letters above are taken from J.C.
Hadden's article "Some Friends of Browning" in _Macmillan's Magazine_,
Jan. 1898.]
[Footnote 11: Later in life Browning came to think unfavourably of
Shelley as a man and to esteem him less highly as a poet. He wrote in
December 1885 to Dr Furnivall: "For myself I painfully contrast my
notions of Shelley the _man_ and Shelley, well, even the _poet_, with
what they were sixty years ago." He declined Dr Furnivall's invitation
to him to accept the presidency of "The Shelley Society."]
[Footnote 12: Even the publishers--Saunders and Otley--did not know the
author's name.--"Letters of R.B. and E.B.B.," i. 403.]
[Footnote 13: "V.A. xx," following the quotation from Cornelius Agrippa
means "Vixi annos xx," _i.e._ "the imaginary subject of the poem was of
that age."--Browning to Mr T.J. Wise.]
[Footnote 14: Edmund Gosse: "Robert Browning Personalia," pp. 31, 32. Mr
W. M. Rossetti in "D.G. Rossetti, his Family Letters," i. 115, gives the
summer of 1850 as the date of his brother's letter; and says, no doubt
correctly, that Browning was in Venice at the time. Mr Sharp prints a
letter of Browning's on his early acquaintance with Rossetti, and on the
incident recorded above. I may here note that "Richmond," appended, with
a date, to _Pauline_, was a fancy or a blind; Browning never resided at
Richmond.]