Life and Letters of Robert Browning Part 19

'... While I write, my heart is sore for a great calamity just befallen poor Rossetti, which I only heard of last night--his wife, who had been, as an invalid, in the habit of taking laudanum, swallowed an overdose--was found by the poor fellow on his return from the working-men's cla.s.s in the evening, under the effects of it--help was called in, the stomach-pump used; but she died in the night, about a week ago. There has hardly been a day when I have not thought, "if I can, to-morrow, I will go and see him, and thank him for his book, and return his sister's poems." Poor, dear fellow! ...

'... Have I not written a long letter, for me who hate the sight of a pen now, and see a pile of unanswered things on the table before me?

--on this very table. Do you tell me in turn all about yourself. I shall be interested in the minutest thing you put down. What sort of weather is it? You cannot but be better at your new villa than in the large solitary one. There I am again, going up the winding way to it, and seeing the herbs in red flower, and the b.u.t.terflies on the top of the wall under the olive-trees! Once more, good-bye... .'

The hatred of writing of which he here speaks refers probably to the cla.s.s of letters which he had lately been called upon to answer, and which must have been painful in proportion to the kindness by which they were inspired. But it returned to him many years later, in simple weariness of the mental and mechanical act, and with such force that he would often answer an unimportant note in person, rather than make the seemingly much smaller exertion of doing so with his pen. It was the more remarkable that, with the rarest exceptions, he replied to every letter which came to him.

The late summer of the former year had been entirely unrefreshing, in spite of his acknowledgment of the charms of St.-Enogat. There was more distraction and more soothing in the stay at Cambo and Biarritz, which was chosen for the holiday of 1862. Years afterwards, when the thought of Italy carried with it less longing and even more pain, Mr. Browning would speak of a visit to the Pyrenees, if not a residence among them, as one of the restful possibilities of his later and freer life. He wrote to Miss Blagden:

Biarritz, Maison Gas...o...b..de: Sept. 19, '62.

'... I stayed a month at green pleasant little Cambo, and then came here from pure inability to go elsewhere--St.-Jean de Luz, on which I had reckoned, being still fuller of Spaniards who profit by the new railway. This place is crammed with gay people of whom I see nothing but their outsides. The sea, sands, and view of the Spanish coast and mountains, are superb and this house is on the town's outskirts. I stay till the end of the month, then go to Paris, and then get my neck back into the old collar again. Pen has managed to get more enjoyment out of his holiday than seemed at first likely--there was a nice French family at Cambo with whom he fraternised, riding with the son and escorting the daughter in her walks. His red cheeks look as they should. For me, I have got on by having a great read at Euripides--the one book I brought with me, besides attending to my own matters, my new poem that is about to be; and of which the whole is pretty well in my head,--the Roman murder story you know.

'... How I yearn, yearn for Italy at the close of my life! ...'

The 'Roman murder story' was, I need hardly say, to become 'The Ring and the Book'.

It has often been told, though with curious confusion as regards the date, how Mr. Browning picked up the original parchment-bound record of the Franceschini case, on a stall of the Piazza San Lorenzo. We read in the first section of his own work that he plunged instantly into the study of this record; that he had mastered it by the end of the day; and that he then stepped out on to the terrace of his house amid the sultry blackness and silent lightnings of the June night, as the adjacent church of San Felice sent forth its chants, and voices buzzed in the street below,--and saw the tragedy as a living picture unfold itself before him. These were his last days at Casa Guidi. It was four years before he definitely began the work. The idea of converting the story into a poem cannot even have occurred to him for some little time, since he offered it for prose treatment to Miss Ogle, the author of 'A Lost Love'; and for poetic use, I am almost certain, to one of his leading contemporaries. It was this slow process of incubation which gave so much force and distinctness to his ultimate presentment of the characters; though it infused a large measure of personal imagination, and, as we shall see, of personal reminiscence, into their historical truth.

Before 'The Ring and the Book' was actually begun, 'Dramatis Personae'

and 'In a Balcony' were to be completed. Their production had been delayed during Mrs. Browning's lifetime, and necessarily interrupted by her death; but we hear of the work as progressing steadily during this summer of 1862.

A painful subject of correspondence had been also for some time engaging Mr. Browning's thoughts and pen. A letter to Miss Blagden written January 19, '63, is so expressive of his continued att.i.tude towards the questions involved that, in spite of its strong language, his family advise its publication. The name of the person referred to will alone be omitted.

'... Ever since I set foot in England I have been pestered with applications for leave to write the Life of my wife--I have refused--and there an end. I have last week received two communications from friends, enclosing the letters of a certain ... of ..., asking them for details of life and letters, for a biography he is engaged in--adding, that he "has secured the correspondence with her old friend ..." Think of this beast working away at this, not deeming my feelings or those of her family worthy of notice--and meaning to print letters written years and years ago, on the most intimate and personal subjects to an "old friend"--which, at the poor ... [friend's] death fell into the hands of a complete stranger, who, at once wanted to print them, but desisted through Ba's earnest expostulation enforced by my own threat to take law proceedings--as fortunately letters are copyright. I find this woman died last year, and her son writes to me this morning that ... got them from him as autographs merely--he will try and get them back... , evidently a blackguard, got my letter, which gave him his deserts, on Sat.u.r.day--no answer yet,--if none comes, I shall be forced to advertise in the 'Times', and obtain an injunction. But what I suffer in feeling the hands of these blackguards (for I forgot to say another man has been making similar applications to friends) what I undergo with their paws in my very bowels, you can guess, and G.o.d knows! No friend, of course, would ever give up the letters--if anybody ever is forced to do that which _she_ would have writhed under--if it ever _were_ necessary, why, _I_ should be forced to do it, and, with any good to her memory and fame, my own pain in the attempt would be turned into joy--I should _do_ it at whatever cost: but it is not only unnecessary but absurdly useless--and, indeed, it shall not be done if I can stop the scamp's knavery along with his breath.

'I am going to reprint the Greek Christian Poets and another essay--nothing that ought to be published shall be kept back,--and this she certainly intended to correct, augment, and re-produce--but _I_ open the doubled-up paper! Warn anyone you may think needs the warning of the utter distress in which I should be placed were this scoundrel, or any other of the sort, to baffle me and bring out the letters--I can't prevent fools from uttering their folly upon her life, as they do on every other subject, but the law protects property,--as these letters are. Only last week, or so, the Bishop of Exeter stopped the publication of an announced "Life"--containing extracts from his correspondence--and so I shall do... .'

Mr. Browning only resented the exactions of modern biography in the same degree as most other right-minded persons; but there was, to his thinking, something specially ungenerous in dragging to light any immature or unconsidered utterance which the writer's later judgment would have disclaimed. Early work was always for him included in this category; and here it was possible to disagree with him; since the promise of genius has a legitimate interest from which no distance from its subsequent fulfilment can detract. But there could be no disagreement as to the rights and decencies involved in the present case; and, as we hear no more of the letters to Mr... ., we may perhaps a.s.sume that their intending publisher was acting in ignorance, but did not wish to act in defiance, of Mr. Browning's feeling in the matter.

In the course of this year, 1863, Mr. Browning brought out, through Chapman and Hall, the still well-known and well-loved three-volume edition of his works, including 'Sordello', but again excluding 'Pauline'. A selection of his poems which appeared somewhat earlier, if we may judge by the preface, dated November 1862, deserves mention as a tribute to friendship. The volume had been prepared by John Forster and Bryan Waller Procter (Barry Cornwall), 'two friends,' as the preface states, 'who from the first appearance of 'Paracelsus' have regarded its writer as among the few great poets of the century.' Mr. Browning had long before signalized his feeling for Barry Cornwall by the dedication of 'Colombe's Birthday'. He discharged the present debt to Mr. Procter, if such there was, by the attentions which he rendered to his infirm old age. For many years he visited him every Sunday, in spite of a deafness ultimately so complete that it was only possible to converse with him in writing. These visits were afterwards, at her urgent request, continued to Mr. Procter's widow.

Chapter 15

1863-1869

p.o.r.nic--'James Lee's Wife'--Meeting at Mr. F. Palgrave's--Letters to Miss Blagden--His own Estimate of his Work--His Father's Illness and Death; Miss Browning--Le Croisic--Academic Honours; Letter to the Master of Balliol--Death of Miss Barrett--Audierne--Uniform Edition of his Works--His rising Fame--'Dramatis Personae'--'The Ring and the Book'; Character of Pompilia.

The most constant contributions to Mr. Browning's history are supplied during the next eight or nine years by extracts from his letters to Miss Blagden. Our next will be dated from Ste.-Marie, near p.o.r.nic, where he and his family again spent their holiday in 1864 and 1865. Some idea of the life he led there is given at the close of a letter to Frederic Leighton, August 17, 1863, in which he says:

'I live upon milk and fruit, bathe daily, do a good morning's work, read a little with Pen and somewhat more by myself, go to bed early, and get up earlyish--rather liking it all.'

This mention of a diet of milk and fruit recalls a favourite habit of Mr. Browning's: that of almost renouncing animal food whenever he went abroad. It was partly promoted by the inferior quality of foreign meat, and showed no sign of specially agreeing with him, at all events in his later years, when he habitually returned to England looking thinner and more haggard than before he left it. But the change was always congenial to his taste.

A fuller picture of these simple, peaceful, and poetic p.o.r.nic days comes to us through Miss Blagden, August 18:

'... This is a wild little place in Brittany, something like that village where we stayed last year. Close to the sea--a hamlet of a dozen houses, perfectly lonely--one may walk on the edge of the low rocks by the sea for miles. Our house is the Mayor's, large enough, clean and bare. If I could, I would stay just as I am for many a day. I feel out of the very earth sometimes as I sit here at the window; with the little church, a field, a few houses, and the sea. On a weekday there is n.o.body in the village, plenty of hay-stacks, cows and fowls; all our b.u.t.ter, eggs, milk, are produced in the farm-house. Such a soft sea, and such a mournful wind!

'I wrote a poem yesterday of 120 lines, and mean to keep writing whether I like it or not... .'

That 'window' was the 'Doorway' in 'James Lee's Wife'. The sea, the field, and the fig-tree were visible from it.

A long interval in the correspondence, at all events so far as we are concerned, carries us to the December of 1864, and then Mr. Browning wrote:

'... on the other hand, I feel such comfort and delight in doing the best I can with my own object of life, poetry--which, I think, I never could have seen the good of before, that it shows me I have taken the root I _did_ take, _well_. I hope to do much more yet--and that the flower of it will be put into Her hand somehow. I really have great opportunities and advantages--on the whole, almost unprecedented ones--I think, no other disturbances and cares than those I am most grateful for being allowed to have... .'

One of our very few written reminiscences of Mr. Browning's social life refers to this year, 1864, and to the evening, February 12, on which he signed his will in the presence of Mr. Francis Palgrave and Alfred Tennyson. It is inscribed in the diary of Mr. Thomas Richmond, then chaplain to St. George's Hospital; and Mr. Reginald Palgrave has kindly procured me a copy of it. A brilliant party had met at dinner at the house of Mr. F. Palgrave, York Gate, Regent's Park; Mr. Richmond, having fulfilled a prior engagement, had joined it later. 'There were, in order,' he says, 'round the dinner-table (dinner being over), Gifford Palgrave, Tennyson, Dr. John Ogle, Sir Francis H. Doyle, Frank Palgrave, W. E. Gladstone, Browning, Sir John Simeon, Monsignor Patterson, Woolner, and Reginald Palgrave.'

Mr. Richmond closes his entry by saying he will never forget that evening. The names of those whom it had brought together, almost all to be sooner or later numbered among the Poet's friends, were indeed enough to stamp it as worthy of recollection. One or two characteristic utterances of Mr. Browning are, however, the only ones which it seems advisable to repeat here. The conversation having turned on the celebration of the Shakespeare ter-centenary, he said: 'Here we are called upon to acknowledge Shakespeare, we who have him in our very bones and blood, our very selves. The very recognition of Shakespeare's merits by the Committee reminds me of nothing so apt as an ill.u.s.tration, as the decree of the Directoire that men might acknowledge G.o.d.'

Among the subjects discussed was the advisability of making schoolboys write English verses as well as Latin and Greek. 'Woolner and Sir Francis Doyle were for this; Gladstone and Browning against it.'

Work had now found its fitting place in the Poet's life. It was no longer the overflow of an irresistible productive energy; it was the deliberate direction of that energy towards an appointed end. We hear something of his own feeling concerning this in a letter of August '65, again from Ste.-Marie, and called forth by some gossip concerning him which Miss Blagden had connected with his then growing fame.

'... I suppose that what you call "my fame within these four years"

comes from a little of this gossiping and going about, and showing myself to be alive: and so indeed some folks say--but I hardly think it: for remember I was uninterruptedly (almost) in London from the time I published 'Paracelsus' till I ended that string of plays with 'Luria'--and I used to go out then, and see far more of merely literary people, critics &c. than I do now,--but what came of it? There were always a few people who had a certain opinion of my poems, but n.o.body cared to speak what he thought, or the things printed twenty-five years ago would not have waited so long for a good word; but at last a new set of men arrive who don't mind the conventionalities of ignoring one and seeing everything in another--Chapman says, "the new orders come from Oxford and Cambridge," and all my new cultivators are young men--more than that, I observe that some of my old friends don't like at all the irruption of outsiders who rescue me from their sober and private approval, and take those words out of their mouths "which they always meant to say" and never did. When there gets to be a general feeling of this kind, that there must be something in the works of an author, the reviews are obliged to notice him, such notice as it is--but what poor work, even when doing its best! I mean poor in the failure to give a general notion of the whole works; not a particular one of such and such points therein. As I begun, so I shall end,--taking my own course, pleasing myself or aiming at doing so, and thereby, I hope, pleasing G.o.d.

'As I never did otherwise, I never had any fear as to what I did going ultimately to the bad,--hence in collected editions I always reprinted everything, smallest and greatest. Do you ever see, by the way, the numbers of the selection which Moxons publish? They are exclusively poems omitted in that other selection by Forster; it seems little use sending them to you, but when they are completed, if they give me a few copies, you shall have one if you like. Just before I left London, Macmillan was anxious to print a third selection, for his Golden Treasury, which should of course be different from either--but _three_ seem too absurd. There--enough of me--

'I certainly will do my utmost to make the most of my poor self before I die; for one reason, that I may help old Pen the better; I was much struck by the kind ways, and interest shown in me by the Oxford undergraduates,--those introduced to me by Jowett.--I am sure they would be the more helpful to my son. So, good luck to my great venture, the murder-poem, which I do hope will strike you and all good lovers of mine... .'

We cannot wonder at the touch of bitterness with which Mr. Browning dwells on the long neglect which he had sustained; but it is at first sight difficult to reconcile this high positive estimate of the value of his poetry with the relative depreciation of his own poetic genius which constantly marks his att.i.tude towards that of his wife. The facts are, however, quite compatible. He regarded Mrs. Browning's genius as greater, because more spontaneous, than his own: owing less to life and its opportunities; but he judged his own work as the more important, because of the larger knowledge of life which had entered into its production. He was wrong in the first terms of his comparison: for he underrated the creative, hence spontaneous element in his own nature, while claiming primarily the position of an observant thinker; and he overrated the amount of creativeness implied by the poetry of his wife.

He failed to see that, given her intellectual endowments, and the lyric gift, the characteristics of her genius were due to circ.u.mstances as much as those of his own. Actual life is not the only source of poetic inspiration, though it may perhaps be the best. Mrs. Browning as a poet became what she was, not in spite of her long seclusion, but by help of it. A touching paragraph, bearing upon this subject, is dated October '65.

'... Another thing. I have just been making a selection of Ba's poems which is wanted--how I have done it, I can hardly say--it is one dear delight to know that the work of her goes on more effectually than ever--her books are more and more read--certainly, sold. A new edition of Aurora Leigh is completely exhausted within this year... .'

Of the thing next dearest to his memory, his Florentine home, he had written in the January of this year:

'... Yes, Florence will never be _my_ Florence again. To build over or beside Poggio seems barbarous and inexcusable. The Fiesole side don't matter. Are they going to pull the old walls down, or any part of them, I want to know? Why can't they keep the old city as a nucleus and build round and round it, as many rings of houses as they please,--framing the picture as deeply as they please? Is Casa Guidi to be turned into any Public Office? I should think that its natural destination. If I am at liberty to flee away one day, it will not be to Florence, I dare say.