Solitude and Society
The volume which consists of _La Saisiaz_ and _The Two Poets of Croisic_
(1878) brings the work of this decade to a close.[119] _La Saisiaz_, the
record of thoughts that were awakened during that solitary clamber to
the summit of Salève after the death of Miss Egerton-Smith, is not an
elegy, but it remains with us as a memorial of friendship. In reading it
we discern the tall white figure of the "stranger lady," leaning through
the terrace wreaths of leaf and bloom, or pacing that low grass-path
which she had loved and called her own. It serves Browning's purpose in
the poem that she should have been one of those persons who in this
world have not manifested all that lies within them. Does she still
exist, or is she now no more than the thing which lies in the little
enclosure at Collonge? The poem after its solemn and impressive prelude
becomes the record of an hour's debate of the writer with himself--a
debate which has a definite aim and is brought to a definite issue. In
conducting that debate on immortality, Browning is neither Christian nor
anti-Christian. The Christian creed involves a question of history; he
cannot here admit historical considerations; he will see the matter out
as he is an individual soul, on the grounds suggested by his individual
consciousness and his personal knowledge. It may be that any result he
arrives at is a result for himself alone.
But why conduct an argument in verse? Is not prose a fitter medium for
such a discussion? The answer is that the poem is more than an argument;
it is the record in verse of an experience, the story of a pregnant and
passionate hour, during which passion quickened the intellect; and the
head, while resisting all illusions of the heart, was roused to that
resistance by the heart itself. Such an hour is full of events; it may
be almost epic in its plenitude of action; but the events are ideas. The
frame and setting of the discussion also are more than frame and
setting; they co-operate with the thoughts; they form part of the
experience. The poet is alone among the mountains, with dawn and sunset
for associates, Jura thrilled to gold at sunrise, Salève in its evening
rose-bloom, Mont-Blanc which strikes greatness small; or at night he is
beneath the luminous worlds which
One by one came lamping--chiefly that prepotency of Mars.
While he climbs towards the summit he is aware of "Earth's most
exquisite disclosures, heaven's own God in evidence"; he stands face to
face with Nature--"rather with Infinitude." All through his mountain
ascent the vigour of life is aroused within him; and, as he
returns--there is her grave.
The idea of a future life, for which this earthly life serves as an
education and a test, is so central with Browning, so largely influences
all his feelings and penetrates all his art, that it is worth while to
attend to the course of his argument and the nature of his conclusion.
He puts the naked question to himself--What does death mean? Is it total
extinction? Is it a passage into life?--without any vagueness, without
any flattering metaphor; he is prepared to accept or endure any answer
if only it be the truth. Whether his discussion leads to a trustworthy
result or not, the sincerity and the energy of his endeavour after truth
serve to banish all supine and half-hearted moods. The debate, of which
his poem is a report, falls into two parts: first, a statement of facts;
secondly, a series of conjectures--conjectures and no more--rising from
the basis of facts that are ascertained. To put the question, "Shall I
survive death?" is to assume that I exist and that something other than
myself exists which causes me now to live and presently to die. The
nature of this power outside myself I do not know; we may for
convenience call it "God." Beyond these two facts--myself and a power
environing me--nothing is known with certainty which has any bearing on
the matter in dispute. I am like a floating rush borne onward by a
stream; whither borne the rush cannot tell; but rush and stream are
facts that cannot be questioned.
Knowing that I exist--Browning goes on--I know what for me is pain and
what is pleasure. And, however it may be with others, for my own part I
can pronounce upon the relation of joy to sorrow in this my life on
earth:--
I must say--or choke in silence----"Howsoever came my fate,
Sorrow did and joy did nowise--life well weighed--preponderate."
If this failure be ordained by necessity, I shall bear it as best I can;
but, if this life be all, nothing shall force me to say that life has
proceeded from a cause supreme in goodness, wisdom, and power. What I
find here is goodness always intermixed with evil; wisdom which means an
advance from error to the confession of ignorance; power that is
insufficient to adapt a human being to his surroundings even in the
degree in which a worm is fitted to the leaf on which it feeds.
Browning tacitly rejects the idea that the world is the work of some
blind, force; and undoubtedly our reason, which endeavours to reduce all
things in nature to rational conceptions, demands that we should
conceive the world as rational rather than as some wild work of chance.
Upon one hypothesis, and upon one alone, can the life of man upon this
globe appear the result of intelligence:
I have lived then, done and suffered, loved and hated, learnt and taught
This--there is no reconciling wisdom with a world distraught,
Goodness with triumphant evil, power with failure in the aim,
If (to my own sense, remember! though none other feel the same!)
If you bar me from assuming earth to be a pupil's place,
And life, time,--with all their chances, changes,--just probation--space,
Mine for me.
Grant this hypothesis, and all changes from irrational to rational, from
evil to good, from pain to a strenuous joy:--
Only grant a second life, I acquiesce
In this present life as failure, count misfortune's worst assaults
Triumph, not defeat, assured that loss so much the more exalts
Gain about to be.
Thus out of defeat springs victory; never are we so near to knowledge as
when we are checked at the bounds of ignorance; beauty is felt through
its opposite; good is known through evil; truth shows its potency when
it is confronted by falsehood;
While for love--Oh how but, losing love, does whoso loves succeed
By the death-pang to the birth-throe--learning what is love indeed?
Yet at best this idea of a future life remains a conjecture, an
hypothesis, a hope, which gives a key to the mysteries of our troubled
earthly state. Browning proceeds to argue that such a hope is all that
we can expect or ought to desire. The absolute assurance of a future
life and of rewards and punishments consequent on our deeds in the
present world would defeat the very end for which, according to the
hypothesis, we are placed here; it would be fatal to the purpose of our
present life considered as a state of probation. What such a state of
probation requires is precisely what we have--hope; no less than this
and no more. Does our heaven overcloud because we lack certainty? No:
Hope the arrowy, just as constant, comes to pierce its gloom, compelled
By a power and by a purpose which, if no one else beheld,
I behold in life, so--hope!
Such is the conclusion with Browning of the whole matter. It is in
entire accordance with a letter which he wrote two years previously to a
lady who supposed herself to be dying, and who had thanked him for help
derived from his poems: "All the help I can offer, in my poor degree, is
the assurance that I see ever _more_ reason to hold by the same
hope--and that by no means in ignorance of what has been advanced to the
contrary.... God bless you, sustain you, and receive you." To Dr
Moncure Conway, who had lost a son, Browning wrote: "If I, who cannot,
would restore your son, He who can, will." And Mr Rudolph Lehmann
records his words in conversation: "I have doubted and denied it [a
future life], and I fear have even printed my doubts; but now I am as
deeply convinced that there is something after death. If you ask me
what, I no more know it than my dog knows who and what I am. He knows
that I am there and that is enough for him."[120]
Browning's confession in _La Saisias_ that the sorrow of his life
outweighed its joy is not inconsistent with his habitual cheerfulness of
manner. Such estimates as this are little to be trusted. One great shock
of pain may stand for ever aloof from all other experiences; the
pleasant sensations of many days pass from our memory. We cannot tell.
But that Browning supposed himself able to tell is in itself worthy of
note. In _The Two Poets of Croisic_, which was written in London
immediately after _La Saisiaz_, and which, though of little intrinsic
importance, shows that Browning was capable of a certain grace in verse
that is light, he pleads that the power of victoriously dealing with
pain and transforming it into strength may be taken as the test of a
poet's greatness:
Yoke Hatred, Crime, Remorse,
Despair: but ever 'mid the whirling fear,
Let, through the tumult, break the poet's face
Radiant, assured his wild slaves win the race.
This is good counsel for art; but not wholly wise counsel for life.
Sorrow, indeed, is not wronged by a cheerfulness cultivated and
strenuously maintained; but gladness does suffer a certain wrong.
Sunshine comes and goes; the attempt to substitute any unrelieved light
for sunshine is somewhat of a failure at the best. Shadows and
brightness pursuing each other according to the course of nature make
more for genuine happiness than does any stream of moral electricity
worked from a dynamo of the will. It is pleasanter to encounter a breeze
that sinks and swells, that lingers and hastens, than to face a vigorous
and sustained gale even of a tonic quality. Browning's unfailing cheer
and cordiality of manner were admirable; they were in part spontaneous,
in part an acceptance of duty, in part a mode of self-protection; they
were only less excellent than the varying moods of a simple and
beautiful nature.
When _La Saisiaz_ appeared Browning was sixty-six years old. He lived
for more than eleven years longer, during which period he published six
volumes of verse, showing new powers as a writer of brief poetic
narrative and as a teacher through parables; but he produced no single
work of prolonged and sustained effort--which perhaps was well. His
physical vigour continued for long unabated. He still enjoyed the
various pleasures and excitements of the London season; but it is noted
by Mrs Orr that after the death of Miss Egerton-Smith he "almost
mechanically renounced all the musical entertainments to which she had
so regularly accompanied him." His daily habits were of the utmost
regularity, varying hardly at all from week to week. He was averse, says
Mrs Orr, "to every hought of change," and chose rather to adapt himself
to external conditions than to enter on the effort of altering them;
"what he had done once he was wont, for that very reason, to continue
doing." A few days after Browning's death a journalist obtained from a
photographer, Mr Grove, who had formerly been for seven years in
Browning's service, the particulars as to how an ordinary day during the
London season went by at Warwick Crescent. Browning rose without fail at
seven, enjoyed a plate of whatever fruit--strawberries, grapes,
oranges--were in season; read, generally some piece of foreign
literature, for an hour in his bedroom; then bathed; breakfasted--a
light meal of twenty minutes; sat by the fire and read his _Times_ and
_Daily News_ till ten; from ten to one wrote in his study or meditated
with head resting on his hand. To write a letter was the reverse of a
pleasure to him, yet he was diligent in replying to a multitude of
correspondents. His lunch, at one, was of the lightest kind, usually no
more than a pudding. Visits, private views of picture exhibitions and
the like followed until half-past five. At seven he dined, preferring
Carlowitz or claret to other wines, and drinking little of any. But on
many days the dinner was not at home; once during three successive weeks
he dined out without the omission of a day. He returned home seldom at a
later hour than half-past twelve; and at seven next morning the round
began again. During his elder years, says Mr Grove, he took little
interest in politics. He was not often a church-goer, but discussed
religious matters earnestly with his clerical friends. He loved not only
animals but flowers, and when once a Virginia creeper entered the study
window at Warwick Crescent, it was not expelled but trained inside the
room. To his servants he was a considerate friend rather than a master.
So far Mr Grove as reported in the _Pall Mall Gazette_ (Dec 16, 1889).
Many persons have attempted to describe Browning as he appeared in
society; there is a consensus of opinion as to the energy and cordiality
of his way of social converse; but it is singular that, though some
records of his out-pourings as a talker exist, very little is on record
that possesses permanent value. Perhaps the best word that can be quoted
is that remembered by Sir James Paget--Browning's recommendation of
Bach's "Crucifixus--et sepultus--et resurrexit" as a cure for want of
belief. He did not fling such pointed shafts as those of Johnson which
still hang and almost quiver where they struck. His energy did not
gather itself up into sentences but flowed--and sometimes foamed--in a
tide. Cordial as he was, he could be also vehemently intolerant, and
sometimes perhaps where his acquaintance with the subject of his
discourse was not sufficient to warrant a decided opinion.[121] He
appeared, says his biographer, "more widely sympathetic in his works
than in his life"; with no moral selfishness he was, adds Mrs Orr,
intellectually self-centred; and unquestionably the statement is
correct. He could suffer fools, but not always gladly. Speaking of
earlier days in Italy, T.A. Trollope observes that, while he was never
rough or discourteous even to the most exasperating fool, "the men used
to be rather afraid of Browning." His cordiality was not insincere; but
it belonged to his outer, not his inner self. With the exception of
Milsand, he appears to have admitted no man to his heart, though he gave
a portion of his intellect to many. His friends, in the more intimate
sense of the word, were women, towards whom his feeling was that of
comradeship and fraternal affection without over-much condescension or
any specially chivalric sentiment. When early in their acquaintance Miss
Barrett promised Browning that he would find her "an honest man on the
whole," she understood her correspondent, who valued a good comrade of
the other sex, and had at the same time a vivid sense of the fact that
such a comrade was not so unfortunate as to be really a man.
Let witnesses be cited and each give his fragment of evidence. Mr W.J.
Stillman, an excellent observer, was specially impressed in his
intercourse with Browning, by the mental health and robustness of a
nature sound to the core; "an almost unlimited intellectual vitality,
and an individuality which nothing could infringe on, but which a
singular sensitiveness towards others prevented from ever wounding even
the most morbid sensibility; a strong man armed in the completest
defensive armour, but with no aggressiveness."[122] A writer in the
first volume of _The New Review_, described Browning as a talker in
general society so faithfully that it is impossible to improve on what
he has said: "It may safely be alleged," he writes, "that no one meeting
Mr Browning for the first time, and unfurnished with a clue, would guess
his vocation. He might be a diplomatist, a statesman, a discoverer, or a
man of science. But, whatever were his calling, we should feel that it
must be essentially practical.... His conversation corresponds to his
appearance. It abounds in vigour, in fire, in vivacity. Yet all the time
it is entirely free from mystery, vagueness, or technical jargon. It is
the crisp, emphatic and powerful discourse of a man of the world, who is
incomparably better informed than the mass of his congeners. Mr Browning
is the readiest, the blithest, and the most forcible of talkers. Like
the Monsignore in _Lothair_ he can 'sparkle with anecdote and blaze with
repartee,' and when he deals in criticism the edge of his sword is
mercilessly whetted against pretension and vanity. The inflection of his
voice, the flash of his eye, the pose of his head, the action of his
hand, all lend their special emphasis to the condemnation." The mental
quality which most impressed Mr W.M. Rossetti in his communications with
Browning was, he says, "celerity "--"whatever he had to consider or
speak about, he disposed of in the most forthright style." His method
was of the greatest directness; "every touch told, every nail was hit on
the head." He was not a sustained, continuous speaker, nor exactly a
brilliant one; "but he said something pleasant and pointed on whatever
turned up; ... one felt his mind to be extraordinarily rich, while his
facility, accessibility, and _bonhomie_, softened but did not by any
means disguise the sense of his power."[123] Browning's discourse with a
single person who was a favoured acquaintance was, Mr Gosse declares, "a
very much finer phenomenon than when a group surrounded him." Then "his
talk assumed the volume and the tumult of a cascade. His voice rose to
a shout, sank to a whisper, ran up and down the gamut of conversational
melody.... In his own study or drawing-room, what he loved was to
capture the visitor in a low arm-chair's "sofa-lap of leather", and from
a most unfair vantage of height to tyrannize, to walk round the victim,
in front, behind, on this side, on that, weaving magic circles, now with
gesticulating arms thrown high, now grovelling on the floor to find some
reference in a folio, talking all the while, a redundant turmoil of
thoughts, fancies, and reminiscences flowing from those generous
lips."[124]
Mr Henry James in his "Life of Story"[125] is less pictorial, but he is
characteristically subtle in his rendering of the facts. He brings us
back, however, to Browning as seen in society. He speaks of the Italian
as a comparatively idyllic period which seemed to be "built out," though
this was not really the case, by the brilliant London period. It was, he
says, as if Browning had divided his personal consciousness into two
independent compartments. The man of the world "walked abroad, showed
himself, talked, right resonantly, abounded, multiplied his connections,
did his duty." The poet--an inscrutable personage--"sat at home and
knew, as well he might, in what quarters of _that_ sphere to look for
suitable company." "The poet and the 'member of society' were, in a
word, dissociated in him as they can rarely elsewhere have been.... The
wall that built out the idyll (as we call it for convenience) of which
memory and imagination were virtually composed for him, stood there
behind him solidly enough, but subject to his privilege of living almost
equally on both sides of it. It contained an invisible door, through
which, working the lock at will, he could softly pass, and of which he
kept the golden key--carrying about the same with him even in the pocket
of his dinner waistcoat, yet even in his most splendid expansions
showing it, happy man, to none." Tennyson, said an acquaintance of Miss
Anna Swanwick, "hides himself behind his laurels, Browning behind the
man of the world." She declares that her experience was more fortunate;
that she seldom heard Browning speak without feeling that she was
listening to the poet, and that on more than one occasion he spoke to
her of his wife[126]. But many witnesses confirm the impression which is
so happily put into words by Mr Henry James. The "member of society"
protected the privacy of the poet. The questions remain whether the poet
did not suffer from such protection; whether, beside the superfluous
forces which might be advantageously disposed of at the drawing-board or
in thumping wet clay, some of the forces proper to the poet were not
drawn away and dissipated by the incessant demands of Society; whether
while a sufficient fund of energy for the double life was present with
Browning, the peculiar energy of the poet did not undergo a certain
deterioration. The doctrine of the superiority of the heart to the
intellect is more and more preached in Browning's poetry; but the
doctrine itself is an act of the intellect. The poet need not perhaps
insist on the doctrine if he creates--as Browning did in earlier
years--beautiful things which commend themselves, without a preacher,
to our love.
In the autumn of 1878, after seventeen years of absence from Italy,
Browning was recaptured by its charm, and henceforward to the close of
his life Venice and the Venetian district became his accustomed place of
summer refreshment and repose. For a time, with his sister as his
companion, he paused at a hotel near the summit of the Splügen, enjoyed
the mountain air, walked vigorously, and wrote, with great rapidity,
says Mrs Orr, his poem of Russia, _Ivàn Ivànovitch_. When a boy he had
read in Bunyan's "Life and Death of Mr Badman" the story of "Old Tod",
and with this still vivid in his memory, he added to his Russian tale
the highly unidyllic "idyl" of English life, _Ned Bratts_. It was thus
that subjects for poems suddenly presented themselves to Browning, often
rising up as it were spontaneously out of the remote past. "There comes
up unexpectedly," he wrote in a letter to a friend, "some subject for
poetry, which has been dormant, and apparently dead, for perhaps dozens
of years. A month since I wrote a poem of some two hundred lines
['Donald'] about a story I heard more than forty years ago, and never
dreamed of trying to repeat, wondering how it had so long escaped me;
and so it has been with my best things."[127] Before the close of
September the travellers were in a rough but pleasant albergo at Asolo,
which Browning had not seen since his first Italian journey more than
forty years previously. "Such things," he writes, "have begun and ended
with me in the interval!" Changes had taken place in the little city;
yet much seemed familiar and therefore the more dreamlike. The place had
indeed haunted him in his dreams; he would find himself travelling with
a friend, or some mysterious stranger, when suddenly the little town
sparkling in the sunshine would rise before him. "Look! look there is
Asolo," he would cry, "do let us go there!" And always, after the way of
dreams, his companions would declare it impossible and he would be
hurried away.[128] From the time that he actually saw again the city
that he loved this recurring dream was to come no more. He wandered
through the well-known places, and seeking for an echo in the Rocca, the
ruined fortress above the town, he found that it had not lost its
tongue. A fortnight at Venice in a hotel where quiet and coolness were
the chief attractions, prepared the way for many subsequent visits to
what he afterwards called "the dearest place in the world." Everything
in Venice, says Mrs Bronson, charmed him: "He found grace and beauty in
the _popolo_ whom he paints so well in the Goldoni sonnet. The poorest
street children were pretty in his eyes. He would admire a carpenter or
a painter, who chanced to be at work in the house, and say to me 'See
the fine poise of the head ... those well-cut features. You might fancy
that man in the crimson robe of a Senator as you see them in Tintoret's
canvas.'"
But these are reminiscences of later days. It was in 1880 that Browning
made the acquaintance of his American friend Mrs Arthur Bronson, whose
kind hospitalities added to the happiness of his visits to Asolo and to
Venice, who received, as if it were a farewell gift, the dedication of
his last volume, and who, not long before her death in 1901, published
interesting articles on "Browning in Asolo" and "Browning in Venice" in
_The Century Magazine_. The only years in which he did not revisit
Venice were 1882, 1884 and 1886, and in each of these years his absence
was occasioned by some unforeseen mis-adventure. In 1882 the floods were
out, and he proceeded no farther than Verona. Could he have overcome the
obstacles and reached Venice, he feared that he might have been
incapable of enjoying it. For the first time in his life he was lamed by
what he took for an attack of rheumatism, "caught," he says, "just
before leaving St Pierre de Chartreuse, through my stupid inadvertence
in sitting with a window open at my back--reading the Iliad, all my
excuse!--while clad in a thin summer suit, and snow on the hills and
bitterness every where."[129] In 1884 his sister's illness at first
forbade travel to so considerable a distance. The two companions were
received by another American friend, Mrs Bloomfield Moore, at the Villa
Berry, St Moritz, and when she was summoned across the Atlantic, at her
request they continued to occupy her villa. The season was past; the
place deserted; but the sun shone gloriously. "We have walked every
day," Browning wrote at the end of September, "morning and
evening--afternoon I should say--two or three hours each excursion, the
delicious mountain air surpassing any I was ever privileged to breathe.
My sister is absolutely herself again, and something over: I was hardly
in want of such doctoring."[130] Two years later Miss Browning was
ailing again, and they did not venture farther than Wales. At the Hand
Hotel, Llangollen, they were at no great distance from Brintysilio, the
summer residence of their friends Sir Theodore and Lady Martin--in
earlier days the Lady Carlisle and Colombe of Browning's plays.[131] Mrs
Orr notices that Browning, Liberal as he declared himself, was now very
favourably impressed by the services to society of the English country
gentleman. "Talk of abolishing that class of men!" he exclaimed, "they
are the salt of the earth!" She adds, as worthy of remark, that he
attended regularly the afternoon Sunday service in the parish church at
Llantysilio, where now a tablet of Lady Martin's placing marks the spot.
Churchgoing was not his practice in London; "but I do not think," says
Mrs Orr, "he ever failed in it at the Universities or in the country."
At Venice it was his custom to be present with his sister at the
services of a Waldensian chapel, where "a certain eloquent pastor," as
Mrs Bronson describes him, was the preacher. A year before his death
Browning in a letter to Lady Martin recalls the happy season in the Vale
of Llangollen--"delightful weeks--each tipped with a sweet starry Sunday
at the little church leading to the House Beautiful where we took our
rest of an evening spent always memorably."
[Illustration: THE PALAZZO GIUSTINIANI, VENICE.
_From a drawing by_ Miss N. ERICHSEN.]
Before passing on to Venice, where repose was mingled with excitement,
Browning was accustomed to seek a renewal of physical energy, after the
fatigues of London, in some place not too much haunted by the English
tourist, where he could walk for hours in the clear mountain air. In
1881 and 1882 it was St Pierre de Chartreuse, from which he visited the
Grande Chartreuse, and heard the midnight mass; in 1883 and 1885 it was
Gressoney St Jean in the Val d'Aosta--the "delightful Gressoney" of the
Prologue to _Ferishtah's Fancies_, where "eggs, milk, cheese, fruit"
sufficed "for gormandizing"; in 1888 it was the yet more beautiful
Primiero, near Feltre. In the previous year he had, for the second time,
stayed at St Moritz. These were seasons of abounding life. St Pierre was
only "a wild little clump of cottages on a mountain amid loftier
mountains," with the roughest of little inns for its hotel; but its
primitive arrangements suited Browning well and were bravely borne by
his sister.[132] From Gressoney in September 1885 he wrote: "We are all
but alone, the brief 'season' being over, and only a chance traveller
turning up for a fortnight's lodging. We take our walks in the old way;
two and a half hours before breakfast, three after it, in the most
beautiful country I know. Yesterday the three hours passed without our
meeting a single man, woman, or child; one man only was discovered at a
distance at the foot of a mountain we had climbed."[133] All things
pleased him; an August snowstorm at St Moritz was made amends for by
"the magnificence of the mountain and its firs black against the
universal white"; it served moreover as an illustration of a passage in
the Iliad, the only book that accompanied him from England: "The days
glide away uneventfully, _nearly_, and I breathe in the pleasant
idleness at every pore. I have no few acquaintances here--nay, some
old friends--but my intimates are the firs on the hillside, and the
myriad butterflies all about it, every bright wing of them under the
snow to-day, which ought not to have been for a fortnight yet."[134] And
from Primiero in 1888, when his strength had considerably declined, a
letter tells of unabated pleasure; of mountains "which morning and
evening, in turn, transmute literally to gold," with at times a silver
change; of the valley "one green luxuriance"; of the tiger-lilies in the
garden above ten feet high, every bloom and every leaf faultless; and of
the captive fox, "most engaging of little vixens," who, to Browning's
great joy, broke her chain and escaped.[135] As each successive volume
that he published seemed to him his best, so of his mountain places of
abode the last always was the loveliest.
At Venice for a time the quiet Albergo dell' Universo suited Browning
and his sister well, but when Mrs Bronson pressed them to accept the use
of a suite of rooms in the Palazzo Giustiniani Recanati and the kind
offer was accepted, the gain was considerable; and the _Palazzo_ has
historical associations dating from the fifteenth century which pleased
Browning's imagination. It was his habit to rise early, and after a
light breakfast to visit the Public Gardens with his sister. He had many
friends--Mrs Bronson is our informant--whose wants or wishes he bore in
mind--the prisoned elephant, the baboon, the kangaroo, the marmosets,
the pelicans, the ostrich; three times, with strict punctuality, he
made his rounds, and then returned to his apartment. At noon appeared
the second and more substantial breakfast, at which Italian dishes were
preferred. Browning wrote passionately against the vivisection of
animals, and strenuously declaimed against the decoration of a lady's
hat with the spoils of birds--
Clothed with murder of His best
Of harmless beings.
He praised God--for pleasure as he teaches us is praise--by heartily
enjoying ortolans, "a dozen luscious lumps" provided by the cook of the
Giustiniani-Recanati palace; to vary his own phrasing, he was
Fed with murder of His best
Of harmless beings,
and laughed, innocently enough, with his good sister over the delicious
"mouthfuls for cardinals."[136] As if the pleasure of the eye in beauty
gained at a bird's expense were more criminal than the gusto of the
tongue in lusciousness, curbed by piquancy, gained at the expense of a
dozen other birds! At three o'clock came the gondola, and it was often
directed to the Lido. "I walk, even in wind and rain, for a couple of
hours on Lido," Browning wrote when nearly seventy, "and enjoy the break
of sea on the strip of sand as much as Shelley did in those old
days."[137] And to another friend: "You don't know how absolutely well I
am after my walking, not on the mountains merely, but on the beloved
Lido. Go there, if only to stand and be blown about by the sea
wind."[138] At one time he even talked of completing an unfinished villa
on the Lido from which "the divine sunsets" could be seen, but the
dream-villa faded after the manner of such dreams. Sunsets, however, and
sunrises never faded from Browning's brain. "I will not praise a cloud
however bright," says Wordsworth, although no one has praised them more
ardently than he. From Pippa's sunrise to the sunrises of mornings when
his life drew towards its close, Browning lavished his praise upon the
scenery of the sky. A passage quoted by Mrs Orr from a letter written a
little more than a year before his death is steeped in colour; when
_Pippa Passes_ becomes the prey of the annotating editor it will
illuminate his page: "Every morning at six I see the sun rise.... My
bedroom window commands a perfect view: the still, grey lagune, the few
sea-gulls flying, the islet of S. Giorgio in deep shadow, and the clouds
in a long purple rack, behind which a sort of spirit of rose burns up
till presently all the rims are on fire with gold, and last of all the
orb sends before it a long column of its own essence apparently: so my
day begins." The sea-gulls of which this extract speaks were, Mrs
Bronson tells us, a special delight to Browning. On a day of gales "he
would stand at the window and watch them as they sailed to and fro, a
sure sign of heavy storms in the Adriatic." To him, as he declared, they
were even more interesting than the doves of St Mark.
Sometimes his walks, guided by Mrs Bronson's daughter, "the best
cicerone in the world," he said, were through the narrowest by-streets
of the city, where he rejoiced in the discovery, or what he supposed to
be discovery, of some neglected stone of Venice. Occasionally he
examined curiously the monuments of the churches. His American friend
tells at length the story of a search in the Church of San Niccolò for
the tomb of the chieftain Salinguerra of Browning's own _Sordello_. At
times he entered the bric-a-brac shops, and made a purchase of some
piece of old furniture or tapestry. His rule "never to buy anything
without knowing exactly what he wished to do with it" must have been
interpreted liberally, for when about to move in June 1887 from Warwick
Crescent to De Vere Gardens many treasures acquired in Italy were, Mrs
Orr tells us, stowed away in the house which he was on the point of
leaving. And the latest bibelot was always the most enchanting: "Like a
child with a new toy," says Mrs Bronson, "he would carry it himself
(size and weight permitting) into the gondola, rejoice over his chance
in finding it, and descant eloquently upon its intrinsic merits." Thus,
or with his son's assistance, came to De Vere Gardens brass lamps that
had hung in Venetian chapels, the silver Jewish "Sabbath lamp," and the
"four little heads"--the seasons--after which, Browning declared, he
would not buy another thing for the house.[139] Returning from his walks
on the Lido or wanderings through the little _calli_, he showed that
unwise half-disdain, which an unenlightened masculine Herakles might
have shown, for the blessedness of five o'clock tea. At dinner he was in
his toilet what Mr Henry James calls the "member of society," never the
poet whose necktie is a dithyramb. Good sense was his habit if not his
foible. And why should we deny ourselves here the pleasure of imagining
Miss Browning at these pleasant ceremonies, as Mrs Bronson describes
her, wearing "beautiful gowns of rich and sombre tints, and appearing
each day in a different and most dainty French cap and quaint antique
jewels"? If other guests were not present, sometimes a visit to the
theatre followed. The Venetian comedies of Gallina especially pleased
Browning; he went to his spacious box at the Goldoni evening after
evening, and did not fail to express his thanks to his "brother
dramatist" for the enjoyment he had received. In his _Toccata of
Galuppi_ he had expressed the melancholy which underlies the transitory
gaiety of eighteenth-century life in Venice; but he could also remember
its innocent gladnesses without this sense of melancholy. When in 1883
the committee of the Goldoni monument asked Browning to contribute a
poem to their Album he immediately complied with the request. It was
"scribbled off," according to Mrs Orr, while Professor Molmenti's
messenger was waiting; it was ready the day after the request reached
him, says Mrs Bronson, and was probably "carefully thought out before he
put pen to paper." It catches, in the happiest temper, the spirit of
Goldoni's sunniest plays:
There throng the People: how they come and go,
Lisp the soft language, flaunt the bright garb--see--
On Piazza, Calle, under Portico
And over Bridge! Dear King of Comedy,
Be honoured! Thou that didst love Venice so,
Venice, and we who love her, all love thee!
The brightness and lightness of southern life soothed Browning's
northern strenuousness of mood. He would enumerate of a morning the
crimes of "the wicked city" as revealed by the reports of the public
press--a gondolier's oars had been conveyed away, a piece of linen a-dry
had corrupted the virtue of some lightfingered Autolycus of the
canals![140] Yet all the while much of his heart remained with his
native land. He could not be happy without his London daily paper; Mrs
Orr tells us how deeply interested he was in the fortunes of the British
expedition for the relief of General Gordon.
In 1885 Browning's son for the first time since his childhood was in
Italy. With Venice he was in his father's phrase "simply infatuated."
For his son's sake, but also with the thought of a place of retreat when
perhaps years should bring with them feebleness of body, Browning
entered into treaty with the owner, an Austrian and an absentee, for the
purchase of the Manzoni Palazzo on the Grand Canal. He considered it the
most beautiful house in Venice. Ruskin had described it in the "Stones
of Venice" as "a perfect and very rich example of Byzantine
Renaissance." It wholly captured the imagination of Browning. He not
only already possessed it in his dream, but was busy opening new windows
to admit the morning sunshine, and throwing out balconies, while leaving
undisturbed the rich façade with its medallions in coloured marble. The
dream was never realised. The vendor, Marchese Montecucculi, hoping to
secure a higher price, drew back. Browning was about to force him by
legal proceedings to fulfil his bargain, when it was discovered that the
walls were cracked and the foundations were untrustworthy. To his great
mortification the whole scheme had to be abandoned. It was not until
his son in 1888, the year after his marriage, acquired possession of the
Palazzo Rezzonico--"a stately temple of the rococo" is Mr Henry James's
best word for it--that Browning ceased to think with regret of the lost
Manzoni. At no time, however, did he design a voluntary abandonment of
his life in England. When in full expectation of becoming the owner of
the Palazzo Manzoni he wrote to Dr Furnivall: "Don't think I mean to
give up London till it warns me away; when the hospitalities and
innumerable delights grow a burden.... Pen will have sunshine and beauty
about him, and every help to profit by these, while I and my sister have
secured a shelter when the fogs of life grow too troublesome."
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 119: Some parts of what follows on _La Saisiaz_ have already
appeared in print in a forgotten article of mine on that poem.]
[Footnote 120: "An Artist's Reminiscences," by R. Lehmann (1894), p.
231.]
[Footnote 121: Thus he declaimed to Robert Buchanan against Walt
Whitman's writings, with which, according to Buchanan, he had little
acquaintance.]
[Footnote 122: "Autobiography of a Journalist," ii. 210.]
[Footnote 123: From the first of three valuable articles by Mr Rossetti
in _The Magazine of Art_ (1890) on "Portraits of Robert Browning."]
[Footnote 124: Robert Browning, "Personalia," by Edmund Gosse, pp. 81,
82.]
[Footnote 125: Vol. ii. pp. 88, 89.]
[Footnote 126: Anna Swanwick, "A Memoir by Mary L. Bruce," pp. 130, 131.
To Dr Furnivall he often spoke of Mrs Browning.]
[Footnote 127: From Mrs Bronson's article in _The Century Magazine_,
"Browning in Venice."]
[Footnote 128: Related more fully in Mrs Bronson's article "Browning in
Asolo" in _The Century Magazine_.]
[Footnote 129: Mrs Bronson's "Browning in Venice" in _The Century
Magazine_.]
[Footnote 130: To Dr Furnivall, Sept. 28, 1884.]
[Footnote 131: Some notices of Browning in Wales occur in Sir T.
Martin's "Life of Lady Martin."]
[Footnote 132: Letter to Dr Furnivall, August 29, 1881.]
[Footnote 133: To Dr Furnivall, Sept. 7, 1885.]
[Footnote 134: To Dr Furnivall, August 21, 1887.]
[Footnote 135: See for fuller details the letter in Mrs Orr's _Life of
Browning_, pp. 407, 408.]
[Footnote 136: So described by Mrs Bronson.]
[Footnote 137: To Dr Furnivall, Oct. 11, 1881.]
[Footnote 138: Quoted by Mrs Bronson.]
[Footnote 139: Mrs Orr, "Life of Browning," p. 400.]
[Footnote 140: Mrs Bronson records this.]