Stories of Authors, British and American Part 9

XXIX

ROBERT BROWNING

Shortly after Browning's death a young man published his recollections of the poet in an English magazine. The extracts from that article will help one to appreciate the kindliness of the great poet.

"My first meeting with Browning came about in this wise. I was sitting in the studio of a famous sculptor, who, kindly forgetful of my provincial rawness, was entertaining me with anecdotes of his great contemporaries; amongst them, Browning. To name him was to undo the flood-gates of my young enthusiasm. Would my sculptor friend help me to meet the poet, whose teaching had been my only dogma? 'Oh,' said my friend, 'that's easy. Write to him--he is the most amiable fellow in the world--and tell him about yourself, and tell him how much you want to know him. Say, if you like, that you are a friend of mine.' The advice seemed simple but useless. I felt that not even the portfolio of unpublished poems which the imaginative eye might have beheld palpable under my arm could so fortify my modesty. But my friend a.s.sured me that Browning would not be offended, so, after waiting some weeks for my crescent courage, I wrote....

"I was taken up to his study and shown in. The first thing that struck me was that he had built up a barrier of books around his table, perhaps because he feared a too practical enthusiasm. Huge heaps of books lay on the floor, the chairs, the table, and at first I thought the room otherwise unoccupied. But suddenly a dapper little figure emerged from a huge armchair by the fire, and stepped briskly across the room. For a moment I was bewildered. The poet's face was familiar in photographs, but I had somehow imagined him a tall, gaunt man. I recovered myself to find him standing before me, holding both my hands and saying, 'Now this is really very kind of you, to come so far just to see an old man like me.' Then he dragged up a companion chair and forced me into it, standing for some moments by my side, with his hand on my shoulder. Then he sat down and said, 'Well, tell me all about yourself. Have you not brought some of your poems to show me?' Of course I had not. I wanted to see him and talk of his work. But for a while he would not let me do so. 'We'll talk about me later, if you like, though I'm rather tired of the subject,' he said, and proceeded to question me pretty closely about my aim and work. Then he sat and thought awhile, then came across to me and said, 'Do you know that I was nearly fifty before I made any money out of my writings? That's the truth, and you will understand my reluctance to advise any one to embark on such a cruel career. But--if you really mean to go in for it--I would do anything I could to shorten your time of waiting. So you must just send me some of your work, that I may give you my candid opinion, if you think it's worth having. And now come and see my books.'

... "We went down to lunch, and I was introduced to the poet's sister, who is, I was instantly ready to aver, the most charming little lady in the world. I don't remember much of the talk at lunch--except that it turned on Ruskin and his art views, with which latter, it seemed to me, Browning had not much sympathy. He told me two anecdotes designed to prove Ruskin's technical inaccuracy; one relating to Michael Angelo, the other to Browning's own exquisite poem, _Andrea del Sarto_. 'But never mind,' said Browning, 'he writes like an angel.'

"Lunch was finished, and my host apologized for having to turn me out, as he was obliged to attend some 'preposterous meeting,' he said. I was standing in the hall, saying good-by, when suddenly he turned and ran up-stairs. Presently he returned, bringing with him a copy of his wife's poems. 'Will you take this as a record of what I hope is only the first of many meetings?' he said. 'I can't find any of my own in that muddle upstairs, but I would rather you would have this than any of mine.' Yes, I took it, as proud as a boy could be who receives such an honor from his chief idol; prouder than I shall ever be again as I read the inscription: 'With the best wishes and regards of Robert Browning.' And I went away after he had made me promise--as though it were a thing I might be unwilling to do--to let him know when I should be next in town.

... "I called again at the beautiful house in De Vere Gardens. The poet had just come in, he told me, from a meeting of the committee for the memorial to Matthew Arnold, and he was evidently very depressed by the sad thoughts which had come upon him of his 'dear old friend, Mat.' 'I have been thinking all the way home,' he said, 'of his hardships. He told me once, when I asked him why he had written no poetry lately, that he could not afford to do it; but that, when he had saved enough, he intended to give up all other work, and go back to poetry. I wonder if he has gone back to it _now_.' Here Browning's voice shook, and he was altogether more deeply moved than I had ever seen him. 'It's very hard, isn't it?' he went on, 'that a useless fellow like me should have been able to give up all his life to it--for, as I think I told you, my father helped me to publish my early books--while a splendid poet like Arnold actually could not afford to write the poetry we wanted of him.'

... "The last visit I paid to Browning was short enough, but since it _was_ the last, and was marked by one of the most graceful acts ever done to me, I may record it as the conclusion of these memories. He had written inviting me to call soon, but without naming a day or hour. 'If I should happen to be engaged,' he had said, 'I know that your kindness will understand and forgive me.' So I called on the first morning when I was free for an hour. He came across the room with his accustomed heartiness of voice and hand. 'But, my dear boy, why did you come to-day? In ten minutes I have an important business appointment which I _must_ keep.' The ten minutes went all too soon, and I took my hat to go. He was profuse, but plainly sincere, in his apologies for turning me out, and made me promise to come again at a specified hour. I had hardly left the door, when I heard the scurry of footsteps and his voice calling me. I turned and saw him, hatless, at the foot of the steps. 'One moment,' he cried; 'I can't let you go till you tell me again that you are not offended, and I shan't believe _that_ till you promise once again to come. Now, promise'--holding both my hands. Of course I promised, wondering how many smaller men would have shown the same courtesy. For some reason on my part, which I now forget, that appointment was never kept, and I saw him no more.

"As I stood in Poet's Corner that bitter day of last January, and saw him put to rest, I could not but think of him as I had seen him last, with the sunlight on his white hair, and I felt his warm hands, and heard his kindly voice saying, 'Now, promise!' and I could but think of that meeting as a tryst not broken, but deferred. And as I thought again of that life, so rich, so vivid, so complete; of that strong soul which looked ever forth, and saw promise of clear awaking to something n.o.bler than the sweetest dream, I knew that here, at least, was one to whom death could do no wrong."

--Adapted from _Littell's Living Age_.

[Ill.u.s.tration: ALFRED TENNYSON From a photograph from life]

x.x.x

KNIGHT'S REMINISCENCE OF TENNYSON

William Knight, a celebrated Scotch professor and the great expounder of the life and poetry of Wordsworth, in 1890 spent two days with Tennyson at Farringford. In an English magazine he has published his reminiscence of that visit. After relating the feelings of respect and the reverential sentiment with which he approached the place he says: "In the avenue leading to the house, the spreading trees just opening into leaf, with spring flowers around and beneath--yellow cowslips and blue forget-me-nots--and the song of birds in the branches overhead, seemed a fitting prelude to all that followed. Shortly after I was seated in the ante-room, the poet's son appeared, and, as his father was engaged, he said, 'Come and see my mother.' We went into the drawing-room, where the old lady was reclining on a couch. Immediately the lines beginning 'Such age, how beautiful' came into mind. No one could ever forget his first sight of Lady Tennyson, her graciousness, and the radiant though fragile beauty of old age. Both her eye and her voice had an inexpressible charm. She inquired with much interest for the widow of one of my colleagues at the University, who used formerly to live in the island, close to Farringford, and whose family were friends as well as near neighbors. Soon afterwards Tennyson entered, and almost at once proposed that we should go out of doors. After a short stroll on the lawn under the cedars, we went into the 'careless ordered garden,' walked round it, and then sat down in the small summer-house. It is a quaint rectangular garden, sloping to the west, where nature and art blend happily,--orchard trees, and old-fashioned flower-beds, with stately pines around, giving to it a sense of perfect rest. This garden is truly a 'haunt of ancient peace.' Left there alone with the bard for some time, I felt that I sat in the presence of one of the Kings of Men. His aged look impressed me. There was the keen eagle eye, and, although the glow of youth was gone, the strength of age was in its place. The lines in his face were like the furrows in the stem of a wrinkled oak-tree, but his whole bearing disclosed a latent strength and n.o.bility, a reserve of power, combined with a most courteous grace of manner. I was also struck by the neglige air of the man, so different from that of Browning or Arnold or Lowell....

"We talked much of the sonnet. He thought the best in the language were Milton's, Shakspere's, and Wordsworth's; after these three those by his own brother Charles. He said, 'I at least like my brother's next to those by the "three immortals."' ...

"He had no great liking, he said, for arranging the poets in a hierarchy. He found so much that surpa.s.sed him in different ways in all the great ones; but he thought that Homer, aeschylus, Sophocles, Virgil, Dante, Shakspere, and Goethe,--these seven,--were the greatest of the great, up to the year 1800. They are not all equal in rank, and even in the work of that heptarchy of genius, there were trivial things to be found....

"Just at this stage of our talk Mrs. Hallam Tennyson, Mrs. Douglas Freshfield, and her daughter came up the garden-walk to the summer-house. Miss Freshfield wore a hat on which was an artificial flower, a lilac-branch. It at once caught Tennyson's eye. There was a lilac-tree in bloom close at hand, and he said, 'What is that you are wearing? It's a flowery lie, it's a speaking mendacity.' He asked how she could wear such a thing in the month of May! We rose from the bower, and all went down the garden-walk to see the fig-tree at the foot of it, and sundry other things at the western entrance-door, where Miss Kate Greenaway was painting. We returned along a twisting alley under the rich green foliage of elms and ilexes....

"Listening to the wind in the trees and the sound of running water--although it was the very tiniest of rillets--led us away from philosophy, and he talked of Sir Walter Scott, characterizing him as the greatest novelist of all time. He said, 'What a gift it was that Scotland gave to the world in him. And your Burns! He is supreme amongst your poets.' He praised Lockhart's _Life of Scott_, as one of the finest of biographies; and my happening to mention an anecdote of Scott from that book led to our spending the greater part of the rest of our walk in the telling of stories. Tennyson was an admirable storyteller. He asked me for some good Scotch anecdotes, and I gave him some, but he was able to cap each of them with a better one of his own--all of which he told with arch humor and simplicity.

"He then told some anecdotes of a visit to Scotland. After he had left an inn in the island of Skye, the landlord was asked, 'Did he know who had been staying in his house? It was the poet Tennyson.' He replied, 'Lor', to think o' that! and sure I thoucht he was a shentleman!' Near Stirling the same remark was made to the keeper of the hotel where he had stayed. 'Do you ken who you had wi' you t' other night?' 'Naa, but he was a pleesant shentleman.' 'It was Tennyson, the poet.' 'An' what may _he_ be?' 'Oh, he is the writer o' verses such as you see i' the papers.' 'Noo, to think o' that, jest a pooblic writer, an' I gied him ma best bedroom!' Of Mrs. Tennyson, however, the landlord remarked, 'Oh, but _she_ was an angel!'

"I have said that the conversational power of Tennyson struck me quite as much as his poetry had done for forty years. To explain this I must compare it with that of some of his contemporaries. It was not like the meteoric flashes and fireworks of Carlyle's talk, which sometimes dazzled as much as it instructed, and it had not that torrent-rush in which Carlyle so often indulged. It was far more restrained. It had neither the continuousness nor the range of Browning's many-sided conversation, nor did it possess the charm of the ethereal visionariness of Newman's. It lacked the fullness and consummate sweep of Mr. Buskin's talk, and it had neither the historic range and brilliance of Dean Stanley's, nor the fascinating subtlety--the elevation and the depth combined--of that of the late F.D. Maurice.

_But_ it was clear as crystal, and calm as well as clear. It was terse and exact, precise and luminous. Not a word was wasted and every phrase was suggestive. Tennyson did not monopolize conversation. He wished to know what other people thought, and therefore to hear them state it, that he might understand their position and ideas. But in all his talk on great problems, he at once got to their essence, sounding their depths with ease, or, to change the ill.u.s.tration, he seized the kernel, and let the sh.e.l.l and fragments alone. There was a wonderful simplicity allied to his clear vision and his strength. He was more child-like than the majority of his contemporaries, and along with this there was--what I have already mentioned--_a great reserve of power_. His appreciation of other workers belonging to his time was remarkable. Neither he nor Browning disparaged their contemporaries, as Carlyle so often did, when he spotted their weaknesses, and put them in the pillory. From first to last, Tennyson seemed to look sympathetically on all good works, and he had a special veneration for the strong silent thinkers and workers.

"Tennyson appreciated the work of Darwin and Spencer far more than Carlyle did, and many of the ideas and conclusions of modern science are to be found in his poetry. Nevertheless he knew the limitation of science, and he held that it was the n.o.ble office of poetry, philosophy, and religion combined to supplement and finally to transcend it."

x.x.xI

EMERSON ON CARLYLE AND TENNYSON

On Christmas day, 1832, Emerson sailed out of Boston harbor to pay a visit to Europe. His health needed a change of work and scene. His wife had died, he had separated from his congregation, he manifestly was in need of some recreation, and so his friends had advised him to take a trip abroad. On the 2d of February he landed at Malta. From there he traveled through Italy and finally entered England, ready to make the acquaintance of English celebrities whom he had long admired.

He writes in his journal: "Carlisle in c.u.mberland, Aug. 26. I am just arrived in merry Carlisle from Dumfries. A white day in my years. I found the youth I sought in Scotland, and good and wise and pleasant he seems to me, and his wife a most accomplished, agreeable woman.

Truth and peace and faith dwell with them and beautify them. I never saw more amiableness than is in his countenance."

This pa.s.sage, of course, refers to his visit to Carlyle, to visit whom Emerson had driven over from Dumfries to Craigenputtock, where Carlyle had been living for the last five years. In this connection it is interesting to read what the man visited had to say about his visitor: "That man," Carlyle said to Lord Houghton, "came to see me. I don't know what brought him, and we kept him one night, and then he left us. I saw him go up the hill; I didn't go with him to see him descend. I preferred to watch him mount and vanish like an angel."

[Ill.u.s.tration: RALPH WALDO EMERSON From a wood engraving of a life photograph]

In writing of this interview, Mr. Cabot, one of the biographers of Emerson, says: "To Emerson the interview was a happy one, and gratified the chief wish he had in coming to England, though he did not find all that he had sought. He had been looking for a master, but in the deepest matters Carlyle, he found, had nothing to teach him.

'My own feeling,' he says in a letter to Mr. Ireland a few days afterwards, 'was that I had met with men of far less power who had got greater insight into religious truth.' But he had come close to the affectionate nature and the n.o.bility of soul that lay behind the cloud of whim and dyspepsia, and he kept to that, and for the rest, confined his expectations thenceforth to what Carlyle had to give. 'The greatest power of Carlyle,' he afterwards wrote, 'like that of Burke, seems to me to reside in the form. Neither of them is a poet, born to announce the will of the G.o.d, but each has a splendid rhetoric to clothe the truth.'"

During this first visit Emerson dined with Lafayette and a hundred Americans. By the time he made his second visit Emerson was a far more distinguished man than during his first trip. His second visit was made in 1847. This time he was a lion among men. He again calls on the Carlyles. This time the door is opened by Jane.

"They were very little changed (he writes) from their old selves of fourteen years ago, when I left them at Craigenputtock. 'Well,' said Carlyle, 'here we are, shoveled together again.' The flood-gates of his talk are quickly opened and the river is a great and constant stream. We had large communication that night until nearly one o'clock, and at breakfast next morning it began again. At noon or later we went together, Carlyle and I, to Hyde Park and the palaces, about two miles from here, to the National Gallery, and to the Strand--Carlyle melting all Westminster and London down into his talk and laughter as he walked. We came back to dinner at five or later, then Dr. Carlyle came in and spent the evening, which again was long by the clock, but had no other measure. Here in this house we breakfast about nine; Carlyle is very apt, his wife says, to sleep till ten or eleven, if he has no company. An immense talker he is, and altogether as extraordinary in his conversation as in his writing--I think even more so. You will never discover his real vigor and range, or how much more he might do than he has ever done, without seeing him. I find my few hours' discourse with him in Scotland, long since, gave me not enough knowledge of him, and I have now at last been taken by surprise.... Carlyle and his wife live on beautiful terms. Nothing could be more engaging than their ways, and in her book-case all his books are inscribed to her, as they came, from year to year, each with some significant lines."

In another place he writes:

"I had good talk with Carlyle last night. He says over and over for years, the same thing. Yet his guiding genius is his moral sense, his perception of the sole importance of truth and justice, and he too says that there is properly no religion in England. He is quite contemptuous about _Kunst_ (art) also, in Germans, or English, or Americans.... His sneers and scoffs are thrown in every direction. He breaks every sentence with a scoffing laugh--'windbag,' 'monkey,'

'donkey,' 'bladder;' and let him describe whom he will, it is always 'poor fellow.' I said 'What a fine fellow you are to bespatter the whole world with this oil of vitriol!' 'No man,' he replied, 'speaks truth to me.' I said, 'See what a crowd of friends listen to and admire you.' 'Yes, they come to hear me, and they read what I write; but not one of them has the smallest intention of doing these things.'"

While Emerson was in London he was elected to membership in the Athenaeum Club, during his stay in England. Here he had the opportunity of meeting many famous men. He writes:

"Milnes and other good men are always to be found there. Milnes is the most good-natured man in England, made of sugar; he is everywhere and knows everything. He told of Landor that one day, in a towering pa.s.sion, he threw his cook out of the window, and then presently exclaimed, 'Good G.o.d, I never thought of those violets!' The last time he saw Landor he found him expatiating on our custom of eating in company, which he esteems very barbarous. He eats alone, with half-closed windows, because the light interferes with the taste. He has lately heard of some tribe in Crim Tartary who have the practice of eating alone, and these he extols as much superior to the English.... Macaulay is the king of diners-out. I do not know when I have seen such wonderful vivacity. He has the strength of ten men, immense memory, fun, fire, learning, politics, manners, and pride, and talks all the time in a steady torrent. You would say he was the best type of England."

Of Tennyson he writes: "I saw Tennyson, first at the house of Coventry Patmore, where we dined together. I was contented with him at once. He is tall and scholastic looking, no dandy, but a great deal of plain strength about him, and though cultivated, quite unaffected. Quiet, sluggish sense and thought; refined, as all English are, and good-humored. There is in him an air of great superiority that is very satisfactory. He lives with his college set, ... and has the air of one who is accustomed to be petted and indulged by those he lives with. Take away Hawthorne's bashfulness, and let him talk easily and fast, and you would have a pretty good Tennyson. I told him that his friends and I were persuaded that it was important to his health to make an instant visit to Paris, and that I was to go on Monday if he was ready. He was very good-humored, and affected to think that I should never come back alive from France; it was death to go. But he had been looking for two years for somebody to go to Italy with, and was ready to set out at once, if I would go there.... He gave me a cordial invitation to his lodgings (in Buckingham Palace), where I promised to visit him before I went away.... I found him at home in his lodgings, but with him was a clergyman whose name I did not know, and there was no conversation. He was sure again that he was taking a final farewell of me, as I was going among the French bullets, but promised to be in the same lodgings if I should escape alive....

Carlyle thinks him the best man in England to smoke a pipe with, and used to see him much; had a place in his little garden, on the wall, where Tennyson's pipe was laid up."

x.x.xII

LITERARY RECOLLECTIONS OF MAX MUELLER

Another poet whom I knew at Oxford as an undergraduate, and whom I watched and admired to the end of his life, was Matthew Arnold. He was beautiful as a young man, strong and manly, yet full of dreams and schemes. His Olympian manners began even at Oxford; there was no harm in them, they were natural, not put on. The very sound of his voice and the wave of his hand were Jovelike.... Sometimes at public dinners, when he saw himself surrounded by his contemporaries, most of them judges, bishops, and ministers, he would groan over the drudgery he had to go through every day of his life in examining dirty school-boys and school-girls. But he saw the fun of it, and laughed.

What a pity it was that his friends--and he had many--could find no better place for him. Most of his contemporaries rose to high position in Church and State, he remained to the end an examiner of elementary schools. Of course it may be said that like so many of his literary friends, he might have written novels and thus eked out a living by potboilers of various kinds. But there was something n.o.bler and refined in him which restrained his pen from such work. Whatever he gave to the world was to be perfect, as perfect as he could make it, and he did not think that he possessed the talent for novels. His saying that "no Arnold can ever write a novel" is well known, but it has been splendidly falsified of late by his own niece. Arnold was a delightful man to argue with, not that he could easily be convinced that he was wrong, but he never lost his temper, and in the most patronizing way he would generally end by, "Yes, yes! my good fellow, you are quite right, but, you see, my view of the matter is different, and I have little doubt it is the true one!" This went so far that even the simplest facts failed to produce any impression on him....