The Brownings Part 4

During these years we catch a few glimpses of the poet's only sister, Sarianna, who was two years younger than her brother, and quite as fond of listening to the conversation of an uncle, William Shergold Browning, who had removed to Paris. Here he was connected with the Rothschild banking house, and had achieved some distinction as the author of a "History of the Huguenots." He also wrote two historical novels, ent.i.tled "Hoel Mar en Morven" and "Provost of Paris," and compiled one of those harmless volumes ent.i.tled "Leisure Hours." It was this uncle who had brought about the introduction of his nephew and Marquis Amedee de Ripert-Monclar, whose uncle, the Marquis de Fortia, a member of the Inst.i.tut, was a special friend of William Shergold Browning. In later years a grandson of the Paris Browning, after graduating at Lincoln College, became Crown prosecutor in New South Wales. He is known as Robert Jardine Browning, and he was on terms of intimacy with his cousins, Robert and Sarianna, whom he often visited.

[Ill.u.s.tration: ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING

_From a drawing made by Field Talfourd, in Rome, 1855_]

The family friendship with Carlyle was a source of great pleasure to Mrs.

Browning, the poet's mother, and there is on record a night when Carlyle and his brother dined with the Brownings at Hatcham. Another family friend and habitue was the Rev. Archer Gurney, who at a later time became Chaplain to the British Emba.s.sy in Paris. Mr. Gurney was a writer of poems and plays, lyrics and dramatic verse, and a volume of his work ent.i.tled "Fra Cipollo and Other Poems" was published, from which Browning drew his motto for "Colombe's Birthday." Mr. Gurney was deeply interested in young Browning's poetry, and there is a nebulous trace of his having something to do with the publication of "Bells and Pomegranates." Another friend of the poet was Christopher Dowson, who married the sister of Alfred Domett; at their homes, Albion Terrace, and their summer cottage in Epping Forest, Browning was a frequent visitor. Dowson died early; but Field Talfourd (a brother of the author of "Ion" and the artist who made those crayon portraits of Browning and his wife, in the winter of 1859, in Rome), Joseph Arnould, and Alfred Domett, with one or two other young men, comprised the poet's more intimate circle at this time. Arnould and Domett were both studying for the Bar; Arnould had gained the Newdigate in 1834, and had won great applause by his recital (in the Sheldonian Theater) of his "Hospice of St. Bernard." Later he was offered the editorship of the _Daily News_, founded by Forster and d.i.c.kens, but he kept true to his legal studies and in time became the Judge of the High Court at Bombay, and was knighted by the Crown.

There was a dinner given by Macready at which Browning, Carlyle, and Miss Martineau were guests, and later a dinner at the Carlyles' where Browning met a son of Burns "who sang some of his father's songs." To a friend Browning wrote: "I dined with dear Carlyle and his wife (catch me calling people 'dear' in a hurry) yesterday. I don't know any people like them."

Browning pa.s.sed a day with Miss Martineau at Ascot, and again visited her in Elstree, where she was staying with the Macreadys. She greatly admired "Paracelsus," and spoke of her first acquaintance with his poetry as a "wonderful event." He dined with her at her home in Westminster, and there met John Robertson, the a.s.sistant editor of the _Westminster Review_, to which Miss Martineau was a valued contributor. Henry Chorley, a musical critic of the day, was another guest that night, and soon after Browning dined with him "in his bach.e.l.lor abode," the other guests being Arnould, Domett, and Bryan Proctor; later, at a musicale given by Chorley, Browning met Charlotte Cushman and Adelaide Kemble. Chorley drew around him the best musicians of the time: Mendelssohn, Moscheles, Liszt, David, and other great composers were often rendered in his chambers. Proctor was then living in Harley Street, and his house was a center for the literary folk of the day.

George Eliot speaks of the indifference with which we gaze at our unintroduced neighbor, "while Destiny stands by, sarcastic, with our _dramatis personae_ folded in her hands." It was such an hour of destiny as this when, at a dinner given by Sergeant Talfourd, at his home (No. 56) in Russell Square, Browning first met John Kenyon. Our great events mostly come to us like G.o.ds in disguise, and this evening was no exception.

Unknown and undreamed of, the young poet had come to one of those partings of the ways which are only recognized in the perspective of time.

Browning's life had been curiously free from any romance beyond that with the muses. The one woman with whom he had seemed most intimate, Miss f.a.n.n.y Haworth, was eleven years his senior, and their intercourse, both conversationally and in letters, had been as impersonal as literature itself. She was a writer of stories and verse, and had celebrated her young friend in two sonnets. This friendship was one of literary attractions alone, and the poet had apparently devoted all his romance to poetry rather than demanded it in life. But now, golden doors were to open.

At this dinner at Mr. Talfourd's, John Kenyon came over to the poet, after they had left the dining-room, and inquired if he were not the son of his old school-fellow, Robert Browning. Finding this surmise to be true, he became greatly attached to him. Mr. Kenyon had lost his wife some time previously; he had no children, and he was a prominent and favorite figure in London society. Southey said of Kenyon that he was "one of the best and pleasantest of men, whom every one likes better the longer he is known,"

and Kenyon, declaring that Browning "deserved to be a poet, being one in heart and life," offered to him his "best and most precious gift,"--that of an introduction to his second cousin, Elizabeth Barrett.

This was the first intimation of Destiny, but the meeting was still to remain in the future. "Sordello" was published in 1840,--"a colossal derelict on the ocean of poetry," as William Sharp terms it. The impenetrable nature of the intricacies of the work has been the theme of many anecdotes. Tennyson declared that there were only two lines in it--the opening and the closing ones--which he understood, and "they are both lies," he feelingly added. Douglas Jerrold tackled it when he was just recovering from an illness, and despairingly set down his inability to comprehend it to the probability that his mind was impaired by disease; and thrusting the book into the hands of his wife he entreated her to read it at once. He watched her breathlessly, and when she exclaimed, "I don't know what this means; it is gibberish," Jerrold exclaimed, "Thank G.o.d, I am not an idiot."

Still another edifying testimony to the general inability to understand "Sordello" is given by a French critic, Odysse Barot, who quotes a pa.s.sage where the poet says, "G.o.d gave man two faculties," and adds, "I wish while He was about it (_pendant qu'il etait en train_) G.o.d had supplied another--namely, the power of understanding Mr. Browning."

Mrs. Carlyle declared that she read "Sordello" attentively twice, but was unable to discover whether the t.i.tle referred to "a man, a city, or a tree"; yet most readers of this poem will be able to recognize that Sordello was a singer of the thirteenth century, whose fame suddenly lures him from the safety of solitude to the perils of society in Mantua, after which "immersion in worldliness" he again seeks seclusion, and partially recovers himself. The _motif_ of the poem recalls the truth expressed in the lines:

"Who loves the music of the spheres And lives on earth, must close his ears To many voices that he hears."

Suddenly a dazzling political career opens before Sordello; he is discovered to be--not a nameless minstrel, but the son of the great Ghibelline chief, Salinguerra; more marvelous still, he is loved by Palma, in her youthful beauty and fascination; and the crucial question comes, as in some form it must come to every life, whether he shall choose all the kingdoms of power and glory, or that kingdom which is not of earth, and cometh not with observation.

It is easy to realize how such a problem would appeal to Robert Browning.

Notwithstanding the traditional "obscurity" of "Sordello," it offers to the thoughtful reader a field of richest and most entrancing suggestion.

To Alfred Domett, under date of May 22, 1842, Browning writes:[1]

"... I cannot well say nothing of my constant thoughts of you, most pleasant remembrances of you, earnest desires for you. I have a notion you will come back some bright morning a dozen years hence and find me just gone--to heaven, or Timbuctoo! I give way to this fancy, for it lets me write what, I dare say, I have written n.i.g.g.ardly enough, of my real love for you, better love than I had supposed I was fit for.... I have read your poems; you can do anything, and I should think would do much. I will if I live. At present, if I stand on head or heels I don't know; what men require I know as little; and of what they are in possession I know not.... With this I send you your 'Sordello.' I suppose, I am sure, indeed, that the translation from Dante, on the fly-leaf, is your own...."

In another letter to Alfred Domett, Browning thus refers to Tennyson:

"... But how good when good he is! That n.o.ble 'Locksley Hall!'"

Browning had already become enamored of Italy; and Mrs. Bridell-Fox, writing to William Sharp, speaks of meeting the poet after his return, and thus describes the impression he made upon her:[2]

"I remember him as looking in often in the evenings, having just returned from his first visit to Venice. I cannot tell the date for certain. He was full of enthusiasm for that Queen of Cities. He used to ill.u.s.trate his glowing descriptions of its beauties, the palaces, the sunsets, the moonrises, by a most original kind of etching. Taking up a bit of stray notepaper, he would hold it over a lighted candle, moving the paper about gently till it was cloudily smoked over, and then utilizing the darker smears for clouds, shadows, water, or what not, would etch with a dry pen the forms of lights on cloud and palace, on bridge or gondola, on the vague and dreamy surface he had produced. My own pa.s.sionate longing to see Venice dates from those delightful, well-remembered evenings of my childhood."

This visit of the young poet to Italy forged the link of that golden chain which was to unite all his future with that land of art and song which held for him such wonderful Sibylline leaves of the yet undreamed-of chapters of his life.

CHAPTER IV

1833-1841

"O Life, O Beyond, _Art_ thou fair, _art_ thou sweet?"

"How the world is made for each of us!

How all we perceive and know in it Tends to some moment's product thus, When a soul declares itself--to wit, By its fruit, the thing it does!"

ELIZABETH BARRETT'S LOVE FOR THE GREEK POETS--LYRICAL WORK--SERIOUS ENTRANCE ON PROFESSIONAL LITERATURE--n.o.bLE IDEAL OF POETRY--LONDON LIFE--KENYON--FIRST KNOWLEDGE OF ROBERT BROWNING.

Elizabeth Barrett was but twelve days in translating the "Prometheus Bound" of aeschylus, and of the result of this swift achievement she herself declared, when laughingly discussing this work with Home in later years, that it ought to have been "thrown in the fire immediately afterward as the only means of giving it a little warmth." Combined with a few of her other poems, however, it was published (anonymously) in 1832, and received from the _Athenaeum_ the edifying verdict that "those who adventure in the hazardous lists of poetic translation should touch any one rather than aeschylus, and they may take warning from the writer before us."

The quiet life at Sidmouth goes on,--goes on, in fact, for three years,--and the life is not an unmixed joy to Miss Barrett. "I like the greenness and the tranquillity and the sea," she writes to a friend.

"Sidmouth is a nest among elms; and the lulling of the sea and the shadow of the hills make it a peaceful one; but there are no majestic features in the country. The grandeur is concentrated upon the ocean without deigning to have anything to do with the earth...."

In the summer of 1835 the Barretts left Sidmouth for London, locating at first in Gloucester Place (No. 74) where they remained for three years.

Hugh Stuart Boyd had, in the meantime, removed to St. John's Wood; Mr.

Kenyon and Miss Mitford became frequent visitors. Miss Barrett's literary activity was stimulated by London life, and she began contributing to a number of periodicals, and her letter-writing grew more and more voluminous. To Mr. Boyd she wrote soon after their arrival in London:

"As George is going to do what I am afraid I shall not be able to do to-day,--to visit you,--he must take with him a few lines from me, to say how glad I am to feel myself again only at a short distance from you; and gladder I shall be when the same room holds both of us. But I cannot open the window and fly.... How much you will have to say to me about the Greeks, unless you begin first to abuse me about the Romans.

If you begin that, the peroration will be a very pathetic one, in my being turned out of your doors. Such is my prophecy.

"Papa has been telling me of your abusing my stanzas on Mrs. Hemans's death. I had a presentiment that you would...."

If the cla.s.sic lore and ponderous scholarship unfitted Mr. Boyd to feel the loveliness of this lyric, those who enter into its pathos may find some compensation for not being great cla.s.sicists. It is in this poem that the lines occur,--

"Nor mourn, O living One, because her part in life was mourning: Would she have lost the poet's fire, for anguish of the burning?

Albeit softly in our ears her silver song was ringing, The foot-fall of her parting soul is softer than her singing."

Miss Barrett's fugitive poems of this time tell much of the story of her days. She sees Haydon's portrait of Wordsworth, and it suggests the sonnet beginning:

"Wordsworth upon Helvellyn!..."

The poems written previously to "A Drama of Exile" do not at all indicate the power and beauty and the depth of significance for which all her subsequent work is so remarkable. "The Seraphim," "Isobel's Child," "The Virgin Mary to the Child Jesus," however much they may contain occasional glimpses of poetic fire, would never have established her rank. Yet "The Sleep" belongs to this period, and that poem of exquisite pathos, "Cowper's Grave." Antic.i.p.ating a little, there came that poem which awakened England and the modern world, indeed, to a sense of the suffering of children in factory life, "The Cry of the Children," which appeared almost simultaneously with Lord Shaftesbury's great speech in Parliament on child labor. The poem and the statesman and philanthropist together aroused England.