1851 to 1855
It was during the month of the _coup d'état_ that Browning went back in
thought to the poet of his youthful love, and wrote that essay which was
prefixed to the volume of forged letters published as Shelley's by Moxon
in 1852. The essay is interesting as Browning's only considerable piece
of prose, and also as an utterance made not through the mask of any
_dramatis persona_, but openly and directly from his own lips. Though
not without value as a contribution to the study of Shelley's genius, it
is perhaps chiefly of importance as an exposition of some of Browning's
own views concerning his art. He distinguishes between two kinds or
types of poet: the poet who like Shakespeare is primarily the
"fashioner" of things independent of his own personality, artistic
creations which embody some fact or reality, leaving it to others to
interpret, as best they are able, its significance; and secondly the
poet who is rather a "seer" than a fashioner, who attempts to exhibit in
imaginative form his own conceptions of absolute truth, conceptions far
from entire adequacy, yet struggling towards completeness; the poet who
would shadow forth, as he himself apprehends them, _Ideas_, to use the
word of Plato, "seeds of creation lying burningly on the Divine
Hand"--which Ideas he discovers not so often in the external world as
in his own soul, this being for him "the nearest reflex of the absolute
Mind." What a poet of this second kind produces, as Browning finely
states it, will be less a work than an effluence. He is attracted among
external phenomena chiefly by those which summon forth his inner light
and power, "he selects that silence of the earth and sea in which he can
best hear the beating of his individual heart, and leaves the noisy,
complex, yet imperfect exhibitions of nature in the manifold experience
of man around him, which serve only to distract and suppress the working
of his brain." To this latter class of poets, although in _The Cenci_
and _Julian and Maddalo_ he is eminent as a "fashioner," Shelley
conspicuously belongs. Mankind cannot wisely dispense with the services
of either type of poet; at one time it chiefly needs to have that which
is already known interpreted into its highest meanings; and at another,
when the virtue of these interpretations has been appropriated and
exhausted, it needs a fresh study and exploration of the facts of life
and nature--for "the world is not to be learned and thrown aside, but
reverted to and relearned." The truest and highest point of view from
which to regard the poetry of Shelley is that which shows it as a
"sublime fragmentary essay towards a presentment of the correspondency
of the universe to Deity, of the natural to the spiritual, and of the
actual to the ideal."
For Browning the poet of _Prometheus Unbound_ was not that beautiful and
ineffectual angel of Matthew Arnold's fancy, beating in the void his
luminous wings. A great moral purpose looked forth from Shelley's work,
as it does, Browning would add, from all lofty works of art. And it may
be remarked that the criticism of Browning's own writings which
considers not only their artistic methods and artistic success or
failure, but also their ethical and spiritual purport, is entirely in
accord with his thoughts in this essay. Far from regarding Shelley as
unpractical, he notes--and with perfect justice--"the peculiar
practicalness" of Shelley's mind, which in his earlier years acted
injuriously upon both his conduct and his art. His power to perceive the
defects of society was accompanied by as precocious a fertility to
contrive remedies; but his crudeness in theorising and his inexperience
in practice resulted in not a few youthful errors. Gradually he left
behind him "this low practical dexterity"; gradually he learnt that "the
best way of removing abuses is to stand fast by truth. Truth is one, as
they are manifold; and innumerable negative effects are produced by the
upholding of one positive principle." Browning urges that Shelley,
before the close, had passed from his doctrinaire atheism to what was
virtually a theistic faith. "I shall say what I think," he adds--"had
Shelley lived he would have finally ranged himself with the
Christians.... The preliminary step to following Christ is the leaving
the dead to bury their dead." Perhaps this hypothetical anticipation is
to be classed with the surmise of Cardinal Wiseman (if Father Prout
rightly attributed to that eminent ecclesiastic a review of _Men and
Women_ in _The Rambler_) that Browning himself would one day be found in
the ranks of converts to Catholicism. In each case a wish was father to
the thought; Browning recognised the fact that Shelley assigned a place
to love, side by side with power, among the forces which determine the
life and development of humanity, and with Browning himself "power" was
a synonym for the Divine will, and "love" was often an equivalent for
God manifest in Jesus Christ. One or two other passages of the essay may
be noted as illustrating certain characteristics of the writer's modes
of thought and feeling: "Everywhere is apparent Shelley's belief in the
existence of Good, to which Evil is an accident"--it is an optimist
here, though of a subtler doctrine than Shelley's, who is applauding
optimism. "Shelley was tender, though tenderness is not always the
characteristic of very sincere natures; he was eminently both tender and
sincere." Was Browning consulting his own heart, which was always
sincere, and could be tender, but whose tenderness sometimes disappeared
in explosions of indignant wrath? The principle, again, by which he
determined an artist's rank is in harmony with Browning's general
feeling that men are to be judged less by their actual achievements than
by the possibilities that lie unfolded within them, and the ends to
which they aspire, even though such ends be unattained: "In the
hierarchy of creative minds, it is the presence of the highest faculty
that gives first rank, in virtue of its kind, not degree; no pretension
of a lower nature, whatever the completeness of development or variety
of effect, impeding the precedency of the rarer endowment though only in
the germ." And, last, of the tardy recognition of Shelley's genius as a
poet, Browning wrote in words which though, as he himself says, he had
always good praisers, no doubt express a thought that helped to sustain
him against the indifference of the public to his poetry: "The
misapprehensiveness of his age is exactly what a poet is sent to
remedy: and the interval between his operation and the generally
perceptible effect of it, is no greater, less indeed than in many other
departments of the great human effort. The 'E pur si muove' of the
astronomer was as bitter a word as any uttered before or since by a poet
over his rejected living work, in that depth of conviction which is so
like despair." The volume in which Browning's essay appeared was
withdrawn from circulation on the discovery of the fraudulent nature of
its contents. He had himself no opportunity of inspecting the forged
manuscripts, and no question of authenticity was raised until several
copies of the book had passed into circulation.[48]
During the nine months spent in Paris, from September 1851 to June 1852,
Browning enlarged the circle of his friends and made some new and
interesting acquaintances. Chief among friendships was that with Joseph
Milsand of Dijon, whose name is connected with _Sordello_ in the edition
of Browning's "Poetical Works" of the year 1863. Under the title "La
Poésie Anglaise depuis Byron," two articles by Milsand were contributed
to the "Revue des Deux Mondes," the first on Tennyson, the second
(published 15th August 1851) a little before the poet's arrival in
Paris, on Robert Browning. "Of all the poets known to me," wrote his
French critic, "he is the most capable of summing up the conceptions of
the religion, the ethics, and the theoretic knowledge of our period in
forms which embody the beauty proper to such abstractions." Such
criticism by a thoughtful student of our literature could not but
prepare the way pleasantly for personal acquaintance. Milsand, we are
told by his friend Th. Bentzon (Mme. Blanc), having hesitated as to the
propriety of printing a passage in an article as yet unpublished, in
which he had spoken of the great sorrow of Mrs Browning's early
life--the death of her brother, went straight to Browning, who was then
in Paris, and declared that he was ready to cancel what he had written
if it would cause her pain. "Only a Frenchman," exclaimed Browning,
grasping both hands of his visitor, "would have done this." So began a
friendship of an intimate and most helpful kind, which closed only with
Milsand's death in 1886. To his memory is dedicated the volume published
soon after his death, _Parleyings with certain People of Importance_. "I
never knew or shall know his like among men," wrote Browning; and again:
"No words can express the love I have for him." And in _Red Cotton
Nightcap Country_ it is Milsand who is characterised in the lines:
He knows more and loves better than the world
That never heard his name and never may, ...
What hinders that my heart relieve itself,
O friend! who makest warm my wintry world,
And wise my heaven, if there we consort too.
In the correction of Browning's proof-sheets, and especially in
regulating the punctuation of his poems, Milsand's friendly services
were of high value. In 1858 when Browning happened to be at Dijon, and
had reason to believe, though in fact erroneously, that his friend was
absent in Paris, he went twice "in a passion of friendship," as his wife
tells a correspondent, to stand before Maison Milsand, and muse, and
bless the threshold.[49]
Browning desired much to know Victor Hugo, but his wish was never
gratified. After December 2nd Paris could not contain a spirit so fiery
as Hugo's was in hostility to the new régime and its chief
representative. Balzac, whom it would have been a happiness even to look
at, was dead. Lamartine promised a visit, but for a time his coming was
delayed. By a mischance Alfred de Musset failed to appear when Browning,
expecting to meet him, was the guest of M. Buloz. But Béranger was to be
seen "in his white hat wandering along the asphalte." The blind
historian Thierry begged Browning and his wife to call upon him. At the
house of Ary Scheffer, the painter, they heard Mme. Viardot sing; and
receptions given by Lady Elgin and Mme. Mohl were means of introduction
to much that was interesting in the social life of Paris. At the theatre
they saw with the deepest excitement "La Dame aux Camélias," which was
running its hundred nights. Caricatures in the streets exhibited the
occupants of the pit protected by umbrellas from the rain of tears that
fell from the boxes. Tears, indeed, ran down Browning's cheeks, though
he had believed himself hardened against theatrical pathos. Mrs Browning
cried herself ill, and pronounced the play painful but profoundly moral.
Mrs Browning's admiration of the writings of George Sand was so great
that it would have been a sore disappointment to her if George Sand were
to prove inaccessible. A letter of introduction to her had been
obtained from Mazzini. "Ah, I am so vexed about George Sand," Mrs
Browning wrote on Christmas Eve; "she came, she has gone, and we haven't
met." In February she again was known to be for a few days in Paris;
Browning was not eager to push through difficulties on the chance of
obtaining an interview, but his wife was all impatience: "' No,' said I,
'you _shan't_ be proud, and I _won't_ be proud, and we _will_ see her. I
won't die, if I can help it, without seeing George Sand.'" A gracious
reply and an appointment came in response to their joint-petition which
accompanied Mazzini's letter. On the appointed Sunday Browning and Mrs
Browning--she wearing a respirator and smothered in furs--drove to
render their thanks and homage to the most illustrious of Frenchwomen.
Mrs Browning with beating heart stooped and kissed her hand. They found
in George Sand's face no sweetness, but great moral and intellectual
capacities; in manners and conversation she was absolutely simple. Young
men formed the company, to whom she addressed counsel and command with
the utmost freedom and a conscious authority. Through all her speech a
certain undercurrent of scorn, a half-veiled touch of disdain, was
perceptible. At their parting she invited the English visitors to come
again, kissed Mrs Browning on the lips, and received Browning's kiss
upon her hand. The second call upon her was less agreeable. She sat
warming her feet in a circle of eight or nine ill-bred men,
representatives of "the ragged Red diluted with the lower theatrical."
If any other mistress of a house had behaved so unceremoniously,
Browning declared that he would have walked out of the room; and Mrs
Browning left with the impression--"she does not care for me." They had
exerted themselves to please her, but felt that it was in vain; "we
couldn't penetrate, couldn't really _touch_ her." Once Browning met her
near the Tuileries and walked the length of the gardens with her arm
upon his. If nothing further was to come of it, at least they had seen a
wonderful piece of work, which not to have been blest withal would have
discredited their travel. Only to Mrs Browning's mortification the
spectacle wanted one detail indispensable to its completeness--the
characteristic cigarette was absent: "Ah, but I didn't see her smoke."
Life leaves us always something to desire.
Before the close of June 1852 they were again in London, and found
comfortable rooms at 58 Welbeck Street. When the turmoil of the first
days had subsided, they visited "Kenyon the Magnificent"--so named by
Browning--at Wimbledon, at whose table Landor, abounding in life and
passionate energy as in earlier days, was loud in his applause of the
genius of Louis Napoleon. Mazzini, his "intense eyes full of melancholy
illusions," called at their lodgings in company with Mrs Carlyle, who
seemed to Mrs Browning not only remarkable for her play of ideas but
attaching through her feelings and her character.[50] Florence
Nightingale was also a welcome visitor, and her visit was followed by a
gift of flowers. Invitations from country houses came in sheaves, and
the thought of green fields is seductive in a London month of July; but
to remain in London was to be faithful to Penini--and to the
much-travelled Flush. Once the whole household, with Flush included,
breathed rural air for two days with friends at Farnham, and Browning
had there the pleasure of meeting Charles Kingsley, whose Christian
Socialism seemed wild and unpractical enough, but as for the man
himself, brave, bold, original, full of a genial kindliness, Mrs
Browning assures a correspondent that he could not be other than "good
and noble let him say or dream what he will." It is stated by Mr W.M.
Rossetti that Browning first became acquainted with his brother Dante
Gabriel in the course of this summer. Coventry Patmore gave him the
manuscript of his unpublished poems of 1853 to read. And Ruskin was now
added to the number of his personal acquaintances. "We went to Denmark
Hill yesterday, by agreement," wrote Mrs Browning in September, "to see
the Turners--which, by the way, are divine. I like Mr Ruskin much, and
so does Robert. Very gentle, yet earnest--refined and truthful." At Lord
Stanhope's they were introduced to the latest toy of fashionable
occultism, the crystal ball, in which the seer beheld Oremus, the spirit
of the sun; the supernatural was qualified for the faithful with
luncheon and lobster salad; "I love the marvellous," Mrs Browning
frankly declares. And of terrestrial wonders, with heaven lying about
them, and also India muslin and Brussels lace, two were seen in the
babies of Monckton Milnes and Alfred Tennyson. Pen, because he was
"troppo grande," declined to kiss the first of these new-christened
wonders, but Pen's father, who went alone to the baptism of Hallam
Tennyson, distinguished himself by nursing for some ten minutes and with
accomplished dexterity, the future Governor-General of Australia.
Yet with all these distractions, perhaps in part because of them, the
visit to England was not one of Browning's happiest times. The autumn
weather confined Mrs Browning to her rooms. He was anxious, vexed, and
worn.[51] It was a happiness when Welbeck Street was left behind, and
they were on the way by Paris to their resting-place at Casa Guidi. From
a balcony overlooking one of the Paris boulevards they witnessed, in a
blaze of autumnal sunshine, which glorified much military and civic
pomp, the reception of the new Emperor. Mrs Browning's handkerchief
waved frantically while she prayed that God might bless the people in
this the chosen representative of a democracy. What were Browning's
thoughts on that memorable Saturday is not recorded, but we may be sure
that they were less enthusiastic. Yet he enjoyed the stir and animation
of Paris, and after the palpitating life of the boulevards found
Florence dull and dead--no change, no variety. The journey by the Mont
Cenis route had not been without its trying incidents. At Genoa, during
several days he was deeply depressed by the illness of his wife, who lay
on the sofa and seemed to waste away. But Casa Guidi was reached at
last, where it was more like summer than November; the pleasant nest had
its own peculiar welcome for wanderers; again they enjoyed the sunsets
over the Arno, and Mrs Browning was able to report herself free from
cough and feeling very well and very happy: "You can't think how we
have caught up our ancient traditions just where we left them, and
relapsed into our former soundless, stirless, hermit life. Robert has
not passed an evening from home since we came--just as if we had never
known Paris."[52]
The political condition of Italy was, indeed, a grief to both husband
and wife. It was a state of utter prostration--on all sides "the
unanimity of despair." The Grand Duke, the emancipator, had acquired a
respect and affection for the bayonets of Austria. The Pope was
"wriggling his venom into the heart of all possibilities of free-thought
and action." Browning groaned "How long, O Lord, how long?" His
home-thoughts of England in contrast with Italy were those of patriotism
and pride. His wife was more detached, more critical towards her native
land. The best symptom for Italian freedom was that if Italy had not
energy to act, she yet had energy to hate. To be happy now they both
must turn to imaginative work, and gain all the gains possible from
private friendships. Browning was already occupied with the poems
included afterwards in the volumes of _Men and Women_. Mrs Browning was
already engaged upon _Aurora Leigh_. "We neither of us show our work to
one another," she wrote, "till it is finished. An artist must, I fancy,
either find or _make_ a solitude to work in, if it is to be good work at
all." But as her husband's poems, one by one, were completed, she saw
them, and they seemed to her as fine as anything he had done. Away in
England _Colombe's Birthday_ was given on the stage, with Helen Faucit
in the leading part. It was at least an indication that the public had
not forgotten that Browning was a poet. Here in Florence, although the
hermit life was happy, new friends--the gift of England--added to its
happiness. Frederick Tennyson, the Laureate's brother, and himself a
true poet in his degree, "a dreamy, shy, speculative man," simple withal
and truthful, had married an Italian wife and was settled for a time in
Florence. To him Browning became attached with genuine affection. Mrs
Browning was a student of the writings of Swedenborg, and she tells much
of her new friend in a single Swedenborgian word--"selfhood, the
_proprium_, is not in him." Frederick Tennyson, though left in a state
of bewilderment by Browning's poetry, found the writer of the poetry "a
man of infinite learning, jest and bonhommie, and moreover a sterling
heart that reverbs no hollowness."[53] Another intimate who charmed them
much was one of the attachés of the English embassy, and a poet of
unquestionable faculty, very young, very gentle and refined, delicate
and excitable, full of sensibility, "full of all sorts of goodness and
nobleness," but somewhat dreamy and unpractical, "visionary enough,"
writes Mrs Browning, "to suit me," interested moreover in spiritualism,
which suited her well, "never," she unwisely prophesied, "to be a great
diplomatist." It was hardly, Mr Kenyon, the editor of her letters,
observes, a successful horoscope of the destiny of Lord Lytton, the
future Ambassador at Paris and Viceroy of India.[54]
Early in 1853 Mrs Browning became much interested in the reports which
reached her--many of these from America--of the "rapping spirits," who
in the 'fifties were busy in instructing chairs and tables to walk in
the way they should not go. "You know I am rather a visionary," she
wrote to Miss Mitford, "and inclined to knock round at all the doors of
the present world to try to get out." Her Swedenborgian studies had
prepared her to believe that there were communities of life in the
visible and the invisible worlds which did not permit of the one being
wholly estranged from the other. A clever person who loves the
marvellous will soon find by the sheer force of logic that marvels are
the most natural things in the world. Should we not credit human
testimony? Should we not evict prejudice from our understandings? Should
we not investigate alleged facts? Should we not keep an open mind? We
cannot but feel a certain sympathy with a woman of ardent nature who
fails to observe the bounds of intellectual prudence. Browning himself
with all his audacities was pre-eminently prudent. He did not actively
enter into politics; he did not dabble in pseudo-science; he was an
artist and a thinker; and he made poems, and amused himself with
drawing, modelling in clay, and the study of music. Mrs Browning
squandered her enthusiasms with less discretion. A good dose of
stupidity or an indignant energy of common-sense, impatient of the
nonsense of the thing, may be the salvation of the average man. It is
often the clever people who would be entirely rational and unprejudiced
that best succeed in duping themselves at once by their reason and their
folly. A fine old crusted prejudice commonly stands for a thousand acts
of judgment amassed into a convenient working result; a single act of an
individual understanding, or several of such acts, will seldom contain
an equal sum of wisdom. Scientific discovery is not advanced by a
multitude of curious and ingenious amateurs in learned folly. Whether
the claims of spiritualism are warrantable or fallacious, Mrs Browning,
gifted as she was with rare powers of mind, was not qualified to
investigate those claims; it was a waste of energy, from which she could
not but suffer serious risks and certain loss.
Before she had seen anything for herself she was a believer--a believer,
as she describes it, on testimony. The fact of communication with the
invisible world appeared to her more important than anything that had
been communicated. The spirits themselves "seem abundantly foolish, one
must admit." Yet it was clear to her that mankind was being prepared for
some great development of truth. She would keep her eyes wide open to
facts and her soul lifted up in reverential expectation. By-and-by she
felt the dumb wood of the table panting and shivering with human
emotion. The dogmatism of Faraday in an inadequate theory was simply
unscientific, a piece of intellectual tyranny. The American medium Home,
she learnt from her friends, was "turning the world upside down in
London with this spiritual influx." Two months later, in July 1855, Mrs
Browning and her husband were themselves in London, and witnessed Home's
performances during a séance at Ealing. Miss de Gaudrion (afterwards Mrs
Merrifield), who was present on that occasion, and who was convinced
that the "manifestations" were a fraud, wrote to Mrs Browning for an
expression of her opinion. The reply, as might be expected, declared the
writer's belief in the genuine character of the phenomena; such
manifestations, she admitted, in the undeveloped state of the subject
were "apt to be low"; but they were, she was assured, "the beginning of
access from a spiritual world, of which we shall presently learn more
perhaps." A letter volunteered by Browning accompanied that of his wife.
He had, he said, to overcome a real repugnance in recalling the subject;
he could hardly understand how another opinion was possible than that
"the whole display of 'hands,' 'spirit utterances,' etc., was a cheat
and imposture." It was all "melancholy stuff," which a grain of worldly
wisdom would dispose of in a minute. "Mr Browning," the letter goes on,
"has, however, abundant experience that the best and rarest of natures
may begin by the proper mistrust of the more ordinary results of
reasoning when employed in such investigations as these, go on to an
abnegation of the regular tests of truth and rationality in favour of
these particular experiments, and end in a voluntary prostration of the
whole intelligence before what is assumed to transcend all intelligence.
Once arrived at this point, no trick is too gross--absurdities are
referred to 'low spirits,' falsehoods to 'personating spirits'--and the
one terribly apparent spirit, the Father of Lies, has it all his own
way." These interesting letters were communicated to _The Times_ by Mr
Merrifield (_Literary Supplement_, Nov. 28, 1902), and they called forth
a short additional letter from Mr R. Barrett Browning, the "Penini" of
earlier days. He mentions that his father had himself on one occasion
detected Home in a vulgar fraud; that Home had called at the house of
the Brownings, and was turned out of it. Mr Browning adds: "What,
however, I am more desirous of stating is that towards the end of her
life my mother's views on 'spiritual manifestations' were much modified.
This change was brought about, in great measure, by the discovery that
she had been duped by a friend in whom she had blind faith. The pain of
the disillusion was great, but her eyes were opened and she saw
clearly."[55] It must be added, that letters written by Mrs Browning six
months before her death give no indication of this change of feeling,
but she admits that "sublime communications" from the other world are
"decidedly absent," and that while no truth can be dangerous, unsettled
minds may lose their balance, and may do wisely to avoid altogether the
subject of spiritualism.
Browning's hostility arose primarily from his conviction that the
so-called "manifestations" were, as he says, a cheat and imposture. He
had grasped Home's leg under the table while at work in producing
"phenomena." He had visited his friend, Seymour Kirkup, had found the
old man assisting at the trance of a peasant girl named Mariana; and
when Kirkup withdrew for a moment, the entranced Mariana relieved
herself from the fatigue of her posturing, at the same time inviting
Browning with a wink to be a charitable confederate in the joke by which
she profited in admiration and in pelf. Browning, who would have waged
immitigable war against the London dog-stealers, and opposed all treaty
with such rogues, even at the cost of an unrecovered Flush, could not
but oppose the new trade of elaborate deception. But his feeling was
intensified by the personal repulsiveness of the professional medium.
The vain, sleek, vulgar, emasculated, neurotic type of creature, who
became the petted oracle of the dim-lighted room, was loathsome in his
eyes. And his respect for his wife's genius made him feel that there was
a certain desecration in the neighbourhood to her of men whom he
regarded as verminous impostors. Yet he recognised her right to think
for herself, and she, on the other hand, regarded his scepticism as
rather his misfortune than his crime.
It was a considerable time after his wife's death that Browning's study
of the impostor of the spiritualist circles, "Mr Sludge the Medium,"
appeared in the _Dramatis Personae_ of 1864; the date of its composition
is Rome, 1859-60; but the observations which that study sums up were
accumulated during earlier years, and if Mr Sludge is not a portrait of
Home, that eminent member of the tribe of Sludge no doubt supplied
suggestions for the poet's character-study. Browning evidently wrote the
poem with a peculiar zest; its intellectual energy never flags; its
imaginative grip never slackens. If the Bishop, who orders his tomb at
St Praxed's, serves to represent the sensuous glory and the moral void
of one phase of the Italian Renaissance, so, and with equal fidelity,
does Mr Sludge represent a phase of nineteenth century materialism and
moral grossness, which cannot extinguish the cravings of the soul but
would vulgarise and degrade them with coarse illusions. Unhappily the
later poem differs from the earlier in being uglier in its theme and of
inordinate length. Browning, somewhat in the manner of Ben Jonson when
he wrote _The Alchemist_, could not be satisfied until he had exhausted
the subject to the dregs. The writer's zeal from first to last knows no
abatement, but it is not every reader who cares to bend over the
dissecting-table, with its sick effluvia, during so prolonged a
demonstration.
"Mr Sludge the Medium" is not a mere attack on spiritualism; it is a
dramatic scene in the history of a soul; and Browning, with his
democratic feeling in things of the mind, held that every soul however
mean is worth understanding. If the poem is a satire, it is so only in a
way that is inevitable. Browning's desire is to be absolutely just, but
sometimes truth itself becomes perforce a satire. He takes an impostor
at the moment of extreme disadvantage; the "medium" is caught in the
very act of cheating; he will make a clean breast of it; and his
confession is made as nearly as possible a vindication. The most
contemptible of creatures, in desperate straits, makes excellent play
with targe and dagger; the poetry of the piece is to be found in the
lithe attitudes, absolutely the best possible under the circumstances,
by which he maintains both defence and attack. Half of the long
_apologia_ is a criticism not of those who feast fools in their folly,
but of the fools who require a caterer for the feast; it is a study of
the methods by which dupes solicit and educate a knave. The other half
is Sludge's plea that, knave though he be, he is not wholly knave; and
Browning, while absolutely rejecting the doctrine of so called
spiritualism, is prepared to admit that in the composition of a Sludge
there enters a certain portion of truth, low in degree, perverted in
kind, inoperative to the ends of truth, yet a fragment of that without
which life itself were impossible even for the meanest organism in the
shape of man.
Cowardly, cunning, insolent, greedy, effeminately sensual, playing upon
the vanity of his patrons, playing upon their vulgar sentimentality,
playing upon their vulgar pietisms and their vulgar materialism, Sludge
after all is less the wronger than the wronged. Who made him what he is?
Who, keen and clear-sighted enough in fields which they had not selected
as their special parade-ground for self-conceit, trained him on to
knavery and self-degradation? Who helped him through his blunders with
ingenious excuses--"the manifestations are at first so weak"; or "Sludge
is himself disturbed by the strange phenomena"; or "a doubter is in the
company, and the spirits have grown confused in their communications"?
Who proceeded to exhibit him as a lawful prize and possession, staking
their vanity on the success of his imposture? Who awakened in him the
artist's joy in rare invention? Who urged him forward from modest to
magnificent lies? Who fed and flattered him? What ladies bestowed their
soft caresses on Sludge? And now and again in his course of fraud did he
not turn a wistful eye towards any reckless tatterdemalion, if only the
vagrant lived in freedom and in truth?
It's too bad, I say,
Ruining a soul so!
And in the midst of gulls who persistently refuse to be undeceived
cheating is so "cruel easy." The difficulty is rather that the cheating,
even when acknowledged, should ever be credited for what it is. The
medium has confessed! Yes, and to cheat may be part of the medium
nature; none the less he has the medium's gift of acting as a conductor
between the visible and the invisible worlds. Has he not told secrets of
the lives of his wondering clients which could not have been known by
natural means? And Sludge chuckles "could not?"--could not be known by
him who in his seeming passivity is alive at every nerve with the
instinct of the detective, by him whose trade was
Throwing thus
His sense out, like an ant-eater's long tongue,
Soft, innocent, warm, moist, impassible,
And when 'twas crusted o'er with creatures--slick,
Their juice enriched his palate. "Could not Sludge!"
Haunters of the séance of every species are his aiders and abettors--the
unbeliever, whom believers overwhelm or bribe to acquiescence, the fair
votaries who find prurient suggestions characteristic of the genuine
medium, the lover of the lie through the natural love of it, the
amateur, incapable of a real conviction, who plays safely with
superstition, the literary man who welcomes a new flavour for the
narrative or the novel, the philosophic diner-out, who wants the
chopping-block of a disputable doctrine on which to try the edge of his
faculty. Is it his part, Sludge asks indignantly, to be grateful to the
patrons who have corrupted and debased him?
Gratitude to these?
The gratitude, forsooth, of a prostitute
To the greenhorn and the bully.
The truculence of Sludge is not without warrant; it is indeed no other
than the truculence of Robert Browning, "shaking his mane," as Dante
Rossetti described him in his outbreaks against the spiritualists,
"with occasional foamings at the mouth."[56]
Where then is the little grain of truth which has vitality amid the
putrefaction of Sludge's nature? Liar and cheat as he is, he cannot be
sure "but there was something in it, tricks and all." The spiritual
world, he feels, is as real as the material world; the supernatural
interpenetrates the natural at every point; in little things, as in
great things, God is present. Sludge is aware of the invisible powers at
every nerve:
I guess what's going on outside the veil,
Just as the prisoned crane feels pairing-time
In the islands where his kind are, so must fall
To capering by himself some shiny night
As if your back yard were a plot of spice.
He cheats; yes, but he also apprehends a truth which the world is blind
to. Or, after all, is this cheating when every lie is quick with a germ
of truth? Is not such lying as this a self-desecration, if you will; but
still more a strange, sweet self-sacrifice in the service of truth? At
the lowest is it not required by the very conditions of our poor mortal
life, which remains so sorry a thing, so imperfect, so unendurable until
it is brought into fruitful connection with a future existence? This
world of ours is a cruel, blundering, unintelligible world; but let it
be pervaded by an influx from the next world, how quickly it rights
itself! how intelligible it all grows! And is the faculty of
imagination, the faculty which discovers the things of the spirit--put
to his own uses by the poet and even the historian--is this a power
which cheats its possessor, or cheats those for whose advantage he gives
it play?
Browning's design is to exhibit even in this Sludge the
rudiments--coarse, perverted, abnormally directed and ineffective for
moral good--of that sublime spiritual wisdom, which, turned to its
proper ends and aided by the highest intellectual powers, is present--to
take a lofty exemplar--in his Pope of _The Ring and the Book_. It is not
through spiritualism so-called that Sludge has received his little grain
of truth; that has only darkened the glimmer of true light which was in
him. Yet liar and cheat and coward, he is saved from a purely phantasmal
existence by this fibre of reality which was part of his original
structure. The epilogue--Sludge's outbreak against his corrupter and
tormentor--stands as evidence of the fact that no purifying, no
cleansing, no really illuminating power remains in what is now only a
putrescent luminosity within him. His rage is natural and dramatically
true; a noble rage would be to his honour. This is a base and poisonous
passion with no virtue in it, and the passion, flaring for a moment,
sinks idly into as base a fingering of Sludge's disgraceful gains.
[Illustration: THE VIA BOCCA DI LEONE, ROME, IN WHICH THE BROWNINGS
STAYED.
_From a photograph._]
The summer and early autumn of 1853 were spent by Browning and his wife,
as they had spent the same season four years previously, at the Baths of
Lucca. Their house among the hills was shut in by a row of plane-trees
in which by day the cicale were shrill; at evening fireflies lit up
their garden. The green rushing river--"a flashing scimitar that cuts
through the mountain"--the chestnut woods, the sheep-walks, "the
villages on the peaks of the mountains like wild eagles," renewed
their former delights.
On the longer excursions Browning slackened his footsteps to keep pace
with his wife's donkey; basins of strawberries and cream refreshed the
wanderers after their exertion. "Oh those jagged mountains," exclaims
Mrs Browning, "rolled together like pre-Adamite beasts, and setting
their teeth against the sky.... You may as well guess at a lion by a
lady's lap-dog as at Nature by what you see in England. All honour to
England, lanes and meadowland, notwithstanding. To the great trees above
all." The sculptor Story and his family, whose acquaintance they had
made in Florence before Casa Guidi had become their home, were their
neighbours at the Baths, and Robert Lytton was for a time their guest.
Browning worked at his _Men and Women_, of which his wife was able to
report in the autumn that it was in an advanced state. _In a Balcony_
was the most important achievement of the summer. "The scene of the
declaration in _By the Fireside_" Mrs Orr informs us, "was laid in a
little adjacent mountain-gorge to which Browning walked or rode."
Only a few weeks were given to Florence. In perfect autumnal weather the
occupants of Casa Guidi started for Rome. The delightful journey
occupied eight days, and on the way the church of Assisi was seen, and
the falls of Terni--"that passion of the waters,"--so Mrs Browning
describes it, "which makes the human heart seem so still." They entered
Rome in a radiant mood.--"Robert and Penini singing." An apartment had
been taken for them by their friends the Storys in the Via Bocca di
Leone, and all was bright, warm, and full of comfort. Next morning a
shadow fell upon their happiness--the Storys' little boy was seized with
convulsions; in the evening he was dead.[57] A second child--a girl--was
taken ill in the Brownings' house, and could not be moved from where she
lay in a room below their apartment. Mrs Browning was in a panic for her
own boy, though his apple-red cheeks spoke of health. Rome, for a time,
was darkened with grief and anxiety; nor did the city itself impress her
as she had expected: "It's a palimpsest Rome," she writes, "a
watering-place written over the antique." The chief gains of these Roman
months were those of friendship and pleasant acquaintances added to
those already given by Italy. In rooms under those occupied by the
Brownings was Page the American artist, who painted in colours then
regarded as "Venetian," now almost darkened out of existence, as a gift
for Mrs Browning, the portrait of Robert Browning exhibited in the Royal
Academy of 1856. Browning himself wrote to Story with enthusiasm of
Page's work. "I am much disappointed in it," wrote Dante Rossetti to
Allingham, "and shall advise its non-exhibition." A second portrait
painted at this time--that by Fisher--is familiar to us through a
reproduction in the second volume of _The Letters of Mrs Browning_. A
rash act of the morning of the day on which he entered Rome had
deplorably altered Browning's appearance. In what his wife calls a fit
of suicidal impatience, he perpetrated the high crime and misdemeanour,
and appeared before her wholly unworthy of portraiture with
clean-shaven cheeks and chin. "I cried when I saw him," she tells his
sister, "I was so horror-struck." To mark the sin, his beard, when once
again he recovered his good looks, was gray, but Mrs Browning cherished
the opinion that the argentine touch, as she terms it, gave "a character
of elevation and thought to his whole physiognomy." To complete this
history, it may be added that in 1859 the moustache of his later
portraits was first doubtfully permitted and was presently approved with
decision as picturesque.[58]
Under all disadvantages of appearance Browning made his way triumphantly
in the English and American society of Rome. The studios were open to
him. In Gibson's he saw the tinted Venus--"rather a grisette than a
goddess," pronounced Mrs Browning. Harriet Hosmer, the young American
sculptress, working with true independence, high aims and right woman's
manliness, was both admired and loved. Thackeray, with his daughters,
called at the apartment in the Bocca di Leone, bringing small-talk in
"handfuls of glittering dust swept out of salons." Lockhart, snow-white
in aspect, snow-cold in manner, gave Browning emphatic commendation,
though of a negative kind--"He isn't at all," declared Lockhart, "like a
damned literary man." But of many interesting acquaintances perhaps the
most highly valued were Fanny Kemble and her sister Adelaide
Sartoris--Fanny Kemble magnificent, "with her black hair and radiant
smile," her sympathetic voice, "her eyes and eyelids full of
utterance"--a very noble creature indeed; Mrs Sartoris, genial and
generous, more tolerant than Fanny of Mrs Browning's wayward
enthusiasms, eloquent in talk and passionate in song. "The Kembles,"
writes Mrs Browning, "were our gain in Rome."
Towards the end of May 1854 farewells were said, and the Brownings
returned from Rome, to Florence by vettura. They had hoped to visit
England, or if this should prove impracticable, to take shelter among
the mountains from the summer heat. But needful coin on which they had
reckoned did not arrive; and they resolved in prudence to sit still at
Florence and eat their bread and macaroni as poor sensible folk should
do. And Florence looked more beautiful than ever after Rome; the
nightingales sang around the olive-trees and vineyards, not only by
starlight and fire-fly-light but in the daytime. "I love the very stones
of Florence," exclaims Mrs Browning. Her friend Miss Mitford, now in
England, and sadly failing in health, hinted at a loan of money; but the
answer was a prompt, "Oh no! My husband has a family likeness to Lucifer
in being proud." There followed a tranquil and a happy time, and both
_Men and Women_ and _Aurora Leigh_ maintained in the writers a deep
inward excitement of the kind that leaves an enduring result. A little
joint publication; _Two Poems by E.B.B. and R.B_., containing _A Plea
for the Ragged Schools of London_ and _The Twins_, was sold at Miss
Arabella Barrett's Ragged School bazaar in 1854. It is now a waif of
literature which collectors prize. There is special significance in the
_Date_ and _Dabitur_, the twins of Browning's poem, when we bear in mind
the occasion with which it was originally connected.
In the early weeks of 1855 Mrs Browning was seriously ill; through
feverish nights of coughing, she had in her husband a devoted nurse. His
sleepless hours were troubled not only by anxiety on her account but by
a passionate interest in the heroisms and miseries, of his fellow
countrymen during the Crimean winter: "when he is mild _he_ wishes the
ministry to be torn to pieces in the streets, limb from limb." Gradually
his wife regained health, but she had not long recovered when tidings of
the death of Miss Mitford came to sadden her. Not until April did she
feel once more a leap into life. Browning was now actively at work in
anticipation of printing his new volumes during the approaching visit to
England. "He is four hours a day," his wife tells a correspondent,
"engaged in dictating to a friend of ours who transcribes for him." And
a little later she reports that they will take to England between them
some sixteen thousand lines of verse, "eight on one side, eight on the
other," her husband's total being already completed, her own still short
of the sum by a thousand lines. Allowance, as she pleads, had to be made
for time spent in seeing that "Penini's little trousers are creditably
frilled and tucked." On the whole, notwithstanding illness and wrath
directed against English ministerial blunders, this year of life in
Florence had been rich in happiness--a "still dream-life, where if one
is over-busy ever, the old tapestries on the walls and the pre-Giotto
pictures ... surround us, ready to quiet us again."[59] London lodgings
did not look inviting from the distance of Italy; but the summons north
was a summons to work, and could not be set aside.
The midsummer of 1855 found Browning and his wife in 13 Dorset Street,
London, and Browning's sister was with them. The faithful Wilson, Mrs
Browning's maid, had married a Florentine, Ferdinando Romagnoli, and the
husband also was now in their service. The weeks until mid-October were
occupied with social pleasures and close proof-reading of the sheets of
_Men and Women_[60] Browning took his young friend the artist Leighton
to visit Ruskin, and was graciously received. Carlyle was, as formerly,
"in great force, particularly in the damnatory clauses." But the weather
was drooping, the skies misty, the air oppressive, and Mrs Browning,
apart from these, had special causes of depression. Her married sister
Henrietta was away in Taunton, and the cost of travel prevented the
sisters from meeting. Arabella Barrett--"my one light in London" is Mrs
Browning's word--was too soon obliged to depart to Eastbourne. And the
Barrett household was disturbed by the undutifulness of a son who had
been guilty of the unpardonable crime of marriage, and in consequence
was now exiled from Wimpole Street. In body and soul Mrs Browning felt
strong yearnings for the calm of Casa Guidi.
The year 1855 was a fortunate year for English poetry. _Men and Women_
was published in the autumn; the beautiful epilogue, addressed to
E.B.B., "There they are, my fifty men and women," was written in Dorset
Street. Tennyson's _Maud_ had preceded Browning's volumes by some
months. It bewildered the critics, but his brother poet did justice to
Tennyson's passionate sequence of dramatic lyrics. And though London in
mid-autumn had emptied itself Tennyson happened for a few days to be in
town. Two evenings he gave to the Brownings, "dined with us," writes Mrs
Browning, "smoked with us, opened his heart to us (and the second bottle
of port), and ended by reading _Maud_ through from end to end, and going
away at half-past two in the morning." His delightful frankness and
simplicity charmed his hostess. "Think of his stopping in _Maud_," she
goes on, "every now and then--'There's a wonderful touch! That's very
tender! How beautiful that is!' Yes and it _was_ wonderful, tender,
beautiful, and he read exquisitely in a voice like an organ, rather
music than speech."
One of the few persons who were invited to meet Tennyson on this
occasion, Mr W.M. Rossetti, is still living, and his record of that
memorable evening ought not to be omitted. "The audience was a small
one, the privilege accorded to each individual all the higher: Mr and
Mrs Browning, Miss Browning, my brother, and myself, and I think there
was one more--either Madox Brown or else [Holman] Hunt or Woolner ...
Tennyson, seated on a sofa in a characteristic attitude, and holding the
volume near his eyes ... read _Maud_ right through. My brother made two
pen-and-ink sketches of him, and gave one of them to Browning. So far as
I remember, the Poet-Laureate neither saw what Dante was doing, nor knew
of it afterwards. His deep grand voice, with slightly chaunting
intonation, was a noble vehicle for the perusal of mighty verse. On it
rolled, sonorous and emotional. Dante Rossetti, according to Mr Hall
Caine, spoke of the incident in these terms: 'I once heard Tennyson
read _Maud_; and, whilst the fiery passages were delivered with a voice
and vehemence which he alone of living men can compass, the softer
passages and the songs made the tears course down his cheeks.' ... After
Tennyson and _Maud_ came Browning and _Fra Lippo Lippi_--read with as
much sprightly variation as there was in Tennyson of sustained
continuity. Truly a night of the gods, not to be remembered without
pride and pang."[61] A quotation from a letter of Dante Rossetti to
Allingham gives praise to Mrs Browning of a kind which resembles
Lockhart's commendation of her husband: "What a delightful unliterary
person Mrs Browning is to meet! During two evenings when Tennyson was at
their house in London, Mrs Browning left Tennyson with her husband and
William and me (who were the fortunate remnant of the male party) to
discuss the universe, and gave all her attention to some certainly not
very exciting ladies in the next room."[62] Without detracting from Mrs
Browning's "unliterary" merits, one may conjecture that the ladies who
proved unexciting to Rossetti were Arabella Barrett and Sarianna
Browning.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 48: Browning's Essay on Shelley was reprinted by Dr Furnivall
in "The Browning Society's Papers," 1881-84, Part I.]
[Footnote 49: Letters of E.B.B. ii. 284. On Milsand, the article "A
French friend of Browning," by Th. Bentzon, is valuable and
interesting.]
[Footnote 50: Mrs Orr says that Browning always thought Mrs Carlyle "a
hard and unlovable woman"; she adds, "I believe little liking was lost
between them." Mrs Ritchie, in her "Records of Tennyson, Ruskin, and
Browning" (pp. 250, 251), tells with spirit the story of Browning and
Mrs Carlyle's kettle, which, on being told to "put it down," in an
absent mood he planted upon her new carpet. "Ye should have been more
explicit," said Carlyle to his wife.]
[Footnote 51: See Letters of E.B.B. ii. 127.]
[Footnote 52: Letters of E.B.B. ii. 99.]
[Footnote 53: Letter of F. Tennyson, in Memoir of Alfred Tennyson, by
his son, chapter xviii.]
[Footnote 54: Mr Kenyon's note, vol. ii. 142 of Letters of E.B.B.]
[Footnote 55: _Times Lit. Supplement_, Dec. 5, 1902.]
[Footnote 56: Miss Cobbe's testimony is similar, and Lehmann says that
at Home's name Browning would grow pale with passion.]
[Footnote 57: See "Story and his Friends," by Henry James, 1903, vol. i.
pp. 284, 285.]
[Footnote 58: Letters of E.B.B., ii. 345.]
[Footnote 59: E.B.B. to Ruskin, _Letters_, ii. 199.]
[Footnote 60: Which, however, did not prevent certain errors noted in a
letter of Browning to Dante Rossetti.]
[Footnote 61: Dante Gabriel Rossetti. His "Family Letters," i. 190,
191.]
[Footnote 62: Letters of D.G. Rossetti to William Allingham, 162. See
Mrs Browning's letter to Mrs Tennyson in Memoir of Tennyson by his son,
I vol. edition, p. 329.]
[Illustration: PORTRAIT OF FILIPPO LIPPI.
_By himself. A detail from the fresco in the Cathedral at Praia from a
photograph by_ ALINARI.]