Robert Browning
by
G. K. Chesterton
Part 1 out of 4
Produced by Jonathan Ingram, Victoria Woosley and PG Distributed
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ROBERT BROWNING
BY
G.K. CHESTERTON
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
BROWNING IN EARLY LIFE 1
CHAPTER II
EARLY WORKS 34
CHAPTER III
BROWNING AND HIS MARRIAGE 55
CHAPTER IV
BROWNING IN ITALY 81
CHAPTER V
BROWNING IN LATER LIFE 105
CHAPTER VI
BROWNING AS A LITERARY ARTIST 133
CHAPTER VII
"THE RING AND THE BOOK" 160
CHAPTER VIII
THE PHILOSOPHY OF BROWNING 177
INDEX 203
ROBERT BROWNING
CHAPTER I
BROWNING IN EARLY LIFE
On the subject of Browning's work innumerable things have been said
and remain to be said; of his life, considered as a narrative of
facts, there is little or nothing to say. It was a lucid and public
and yet quiet life, which culminated in one great dramatic test of
character, and then fell back again into this union of quietude and
publicity. And yet, in spite of this, it is a great deal more
difficult to speak finally about his life than about his work. His
work has the mystery which belongs to the complex; his life the much
greater mystery which belongs to the simple. He was clever enough to
understand his own poetry; and if he understood it, we can understand
it. But he was also entirely unconscious and impulsive, and he was
never clever enough to understand his own character; consequently we
may be excused if that part of him which was hidden from him is partly
hidden from us. The subtle man is always immeasurably easier to
understand than the natural man; for the subtle man keeps a diary of
his moods, he practises the art of self-analysis and self-revelation,
and can tell us how he came to feel this or to say that. But a man
like Browning knows no more about the state of his emotions than about
the state of his pulse; they are things greater than he, things
growing at will, like forces of Nature. There is an old anecdote,
probably apocryphal, which describes how a feminine admirer wrote to
Browning asking him for the meaning of one of his darker poems, and
received the following reply: "When that poem was written, two people
knew what it meant--God and Robert Browning. And now God only knows
what it means." This story gives, in all probability, an entirely
false impression of Browning's attitude towards his work. He was a
keen artist, a keen scholar, he could put his finger on anything, and
he had a memory like the British Museum Library. But the story does,
in all probability, give a tolerably accurate picture of Browning's
attitude towards his own emotions and his psychological type. If a man
had asked him what some particular allusion to a Persian hero meant he
could in all probability have quoted half the epic; if a man had asked
him which third cousin of Charlemagne was alluded to in _Sordello_, he
could have given an account of the man and an account of his father
and his grandfather. But if a man had asked him what he thought of
himself, or what were his emotions an hour before his wedding, he
would have replied with perfect sincerity that God alone knew.
This mystery of the unconscious man, far deeper than any mystery of
the conscious one, existing as it does in all men, existed peculiarly
in Browning, because he was a very ordinary and spontaneous man. The
same thing exists to some extent in all history and all affairs.
Anything that is deliberate, twisted, created as a trap and a
mystery, must be discovered at last; everything that is done naturally
remains mysterious. It may be difficult to discover the principles of
the Rosicrucians, but it is much easier to discover the principles of
the Rosicrucians than the principles of the United States: nor has any
secret society kept its aims so quiet as humanity. The way to be
inexplicable is to be chaotic, and on the surface this was the quality
of Browning's life; there is the same difference between judging of
his poetry and judging of his life, that there is between making a map
of a labyrinth and making a map of a mist. The discussion of what some
particular allusion in _Sordello_ means has gone on so far, and may go
on still, but it has it in its nature to end. The life of Robert
Browning, who combines the greatest brain with the most simple
temperament known in our annals, would go on for ever if we did not
decide to summarise it in a very brief and simple narrative.
Robert Browning was born in Camberwell on May 7th 1812. His father and
grandfather had been clerks in the Bank of England, and his whole
family would appear to have belonged to the solid and educated middle
class--the class which is interested in letters, but not ambitious in
them, the class to which poetry is a luxury, but not a necessity.
This actual quality and character of the Browning family shows some
tendency to be obscured by matters more remote. It is the custom of
all biographers to seek for the earliest traces of a family in distant
ages and even in distant lands; and Browning, as it happens, has given
them opportunities which tend to lead away the mind from the main
matter in hand. There is a tradition, for example, that men of his
name were prominent in the feudal ages; it is based upon little beyond
a coincidence of surnames and the fact that Browning used a seal with
a coat-of-arms. Thousands of middle-class men use such a seal, merely
because it is a curiosity or a legacy, without knowing or caring
anything about the condition of their ancestors in the Middle Ages.
Then, again, there is a theory that he was of Jewish blood; a view
which is perfectly conceivable, and which Browning would have been the
last to have thought derogatory, but for which, as a matter of fact,
there is exceedingly little evidence. The chief reason assigned by his
contemporaries for the belief was the fact that he was, without doubt,
specially and profoundly interested in Jewish matters. This
suggestion, worthless in any case, would, if anything, tell the other
way. For while an Englishman may be enthusiastic about England, or
indignant against England, it never occurred to any living Englishman
to be interested in England. Browning was, like every other
intelligent Aryan, interested in the Jews; but if he was related to
every people in which he was interested, he must have been of
extraordinarily mixed extraction. Thirdly, there is the yet more
sensational theory that there was in Robert Browning a strain of the
negro. The supporters of this hypothesis seem to have little in
reality to say, except that Browning's grandmother was certainly a
Creole. It is said in support of the view that Browning was singularly
dark in early life, and was often mistaken for an Italian. There does
not, however, seem to be anything particular to be deduced from this,
except that if he looked like an Italian, he must have looked
exceedingly unlike a negro.
There is nothing valid against any of these three theories, just as
there is nothing valid in their favour; they may, any or all of them,
be true, but they are still irrelevant. They are something that is in
history or biography a great deal worse than being false--they are
misleading. We do not want to know about a man like Browning, whether
he had a right to a shield used in the Wars of the Roses, or whether
the tenth grandfather of his Creole grandmother had been white or
black: we want to know something about his family, which is quite a
different thing. We wish to have about Browning not so much the kind
of information which would satisfy Clarencieux King-at-Arms, but the
sort of information which would satisfy us, if we were advertising for
a very confidential secretary, or a very private tutor. We should not
be concerned as to whether the tutor were descended from an Irish
king, but we should still be really concerned about his extraction,
about what manner of people his had been for the last two or three
generations. This is the most practical duty of biography, and this is
also the most difficult. It is a great deal easier to hunt a family
from tombstone to tombstone back to the time of Henry II. than to
catch and realise and put upon paper that most nameless and elusive of
all things--social tone.
It will be said immediately, and must as promptly be admitted, that we
could find a biographical significance in any of these theories if we
looked for it. But it is, indeed, the sin and snare of biographers
that they tend to see significance in everything; characteristic
carelessness if their hero drops his pipe, and characteristic
carefulness if he picks it up again. It is true, assuredly, that all
the three races above named could be connected with Browning's
personality. If we believed, for instance, that he really came of a
race of mediaeval barons, we should say at once that from them he got
his pre-eminent spirit of battle: we should be right, for every line
in his stubborn soul and his erect body did really express the
fighter; he was always contending, whether it was with a German theory
about the Gnostics, or with a stranger who elbowed his wife in a
crowd. Again, if we had decided that he was a Jew, we should point out
how absorbed he was in the terrible simplicity of monotheism: we
should be right, for he was so absorbed. Or again, in the case even of
the negro fancy; it would not be difficult for us to suggest a love of
colour, a certain mental gaudiness, a pleasure
"When reds and blues were indeed red and blue,"
as he says in _The Ring and the Book_. We should be right; for there
really was in Browning a tropical violence of taste, an artistic
scheme compounded as it were, of orchids and cockatoos, which, amid
our cold English poets, seems scarcely European. All this is extremely
fascinating; and it may be true. But, as has above been suggested,
here comes in the great temptation of this kind of work, the noble
temptation to see too much in everything. The biographer can easily
see a personal significance in these three hypothetical nationalities.
But is there in the world a biographer who could lay his hand upon his
heart and say that he would not have seen as much significance in any
three other nationalities? If Browning's ancestors had been Frenchmen,
should we not have said that it was from them doubtless that he
inherited that logical agility which marks him among English poets?
If his grandfather had been a Swede, should we not have said that the
old sea-roving blood broke out in bold speculation and insatiable
travel? If his great-aunt had been a Red Indian, should we not have
said that only in the Ojibways and the Blackfeet do we find the
Browning fantasticality combined with the Browning stoicism? This
over-readiness to seize hints is an inevitable part of that secret
hero-worship which is the heart of biography. The lover of great men
sees signs of them long before they begin to appear on the earth, and,
like some old mythological chronicler, claims as their heralds the
storms and the falling stars.
A certain indulgence must therefore be extended to the present writer
if he declines to follow that admirable veteran of Browning study, Dr.
Furnivall, into the prodigious investigations which he has been
conducting into the condition of the Browning family since the
beginning of the world. For his last discovery, the descent of
Browning from a footman in the service of a country magnate, there
seems to be suggestive, though not decisive evidence. But Browning's
descent from barons, or Jews, or lackeys, or black men, is not the
main point touching his family. If the Brownings were of mixed origin,
they were so much the more like the great majority of English
middle-class people. It is curious that the romance of race should be
spoken of as if it were a thing peculiarly aristocratic; that
admiration for rank, or interest in family, should mean only interest
in one not very interesting type of rank and family. The truth is that
aristocrats exhibit less of the romance of pedigree than any other
people in the world. For since it is their principle to marry only
within their own class and mode of life, there is no opportunity in
their case for any of the more interesting studies in heredity; they
exhibit almost the unbroken uniformity of the lower animals. It is in
the middle classes that we find the poetry of genealogy; it is the
suburban grocer standing at his shop door whom some wild dash of
Eastern or Celtic blood may drive suddenly to a whole holiday or a
crime. Let us admit then, that it is true that these legends of the
Browning family have every abstract possibility. But it is a far more
cogent and apposite truth that if a man had knocked at the door of
every house in the street where Browning was born, he would have found
similar legends in all of them. There is hardly a family in Camberwell
that has not a story or two about foreign marriages a few generations
back; and in all this the Brownings are simply a typical Camberwell
family. The real truth about Browning and men like him can scarcely be
better expressed than in the words of that very wise and witty story,
Kingsley's _Water Babies_, in which the pedigree of the Professor is
treated in a manner which is an excellent example of the wild common
sense of the book. "His mother was a Dutch woman, and therefore she
was born at Curacoa (of course, you have read your geography and
therefore know why), and his father was a Pole, and therefore he was
brought up at Petropaulowski (of course, you have learnt your modern
politics, and therefore know why), but for all that he was as thorough
an Englishman as ever coveted his neighbour's goods."
It may be well therefore to abandon the task of obtaining a clear
account of Brownings family, and endeavour to obtain, what is much
more important, a clear account of his home. For the great central
and solid fact, which these heraldic speculations tend inevitably to
veil and confuse, is that Browning was a thoroughly typical Englishman
of the middle class. He may have had alien blood, and that alien
blood, by the paradox we have observed, may have made him more
characteristically a native. A phase, a fancy, a metaphor may or may
not have been born of eastern or southern elements, but he was,
without any question at all, an Englishman of the middle class.
Neither all his liberality nor all his learning ever made him anything
but an Englishman of the middle class. He expanded his intellectual
tolerance until it included the anarchism of _Fifine at the Fair_ and
the blasphemous theology of Caliban; but he remained himself an
Englishman of the middle class. He pictured all the passions of the
earth since the Fall, from the devouring amorousness of _Time's
Revenges_ to the despotic fantasy of _Instans Tyrannus_; but he
remained himself an Englishman of the middle class. The moment that he
came in contact with anything that was slovenly, anything that was
lawless, in actual life, something rose up in him, older than any
opinions, the blood of generations of good men. He met George Sand and
her poetical circle and hated it, with all the hatred of an old city
merchant for the irresponsible life. He met the Spiritualists and
hated them, with all the hatred of the middle class for borderlands
and equivocal positions and playing with fire. His intellect went upon
bewildering voyages, but his soul walked in a straight road. He piled
up the fantastic towers of his imagination until they eclipsed the
planets; but the plan of the foundation on which he built was always
the plan of an honest English house in Camberwell. He abandoned, with
a ceaseless intellectual ambition, every one of the convictions of his
class; but he carried its prejudices into eternity.
It is then of Browning as a member of the middle class, that we can
speak with the greatest historical certainty; and it is his immediate
forebears who present the real interest to us. His father, Robert
Browning, was a man of great delicacy of taste, and to all appearance
of an almost exaggerated delicacy of conscience. Every glimpse we have
of him suggests that earnest and almost worried kindliness which is
the mark of those to whom selfishness, even justifiable selfishness,
is really a thing difficult or impossible. In early life Robert
Browning senior was placed by his father (who was apparently a father
of a somewhat primitive, not to say barbaric, type) in an important
commercial position in the West Indies. He threw up the position
however, because it involved him in some recognition of slavery.
Whereupon his unique parent, in a transport of rage, not only
disinherited him and flung him out of doors, but by a superb stroke of
humour, which stands alone in the records of parental ingenuity, sent
him in a bill for the cost of his education. About the same time that
he was suffering for his moral sensibility he was also disturbed about
religious matters, and he completed his severance from his father by
joining a dissenting sect. He was, in short, a very typical example of
the serious middle-class man of the Wilberforce period, a man to whom
duty was all in all, and who would revolutionise an empire or a
continent for the satisfaction of a single moral scruple. Thus, while
he was Puritan at the core, not the ruthless Puritan of the
seventeenth, but the humanitarian Puritan of the eighteenth century,
he had upon the surface all the tastes and graces of a man of culture.
Numerous accomplishments of the lighter kind, such as drawing and
painting in water colours, he possessed; and his feeling for many
kinds of literature was fastidious and exact. But the whole was
absolutely redolent of the polite severity of the eighteenth century.
He lamented his son's early admiration for Byron, and never ceased
adjuring him to model himself upon Pope.
He was, in short, one of the old-fashioned humanitarians of the
eighteenth century, a class which we may or may not have conquered in
moral theory, but which we most certainly have not conquered in moral
practice. Robert Browning senior destroyed all his fortunes in order
to protest against black slavery; white slavery may be, as later
economists tell us, a thing infinitely worse, but not many men destroy
their fortunes in order to protest against it. The ideals of the men
of that period appear to us very unattractive; to them duty was a kind
of chilly sentiment. But when we think what they did with those cold
ideals, we can scarcely feel so superior. They uprooted the enormous
Upas of slavery, the tree that was literally as old as the race of
man. They altered the whole face of Europe with their deductive
fancies. We have ideals that are really better, ideals of passion, of
mysticism, of a sense of the youth and adventurousness of the earth;
but it will be well for us if we achieve as much by our frenzy as they
did by their delicacies. It scarcely seems as if we were as robust in
our very robustness as they were robust in their sensibility.
Robert Browning's mother was the daughter of William Wiedermann, a
German merchant settled in Dundee, and married to a Scotch wife. One
of the poet's principal biographers has suggested that from this union
of the German and Scotch, Browning got his metaphysical tendency; it
is possible; but here again we must beware of the great biographical
danger of making mountains out of molehills. What Browning's mother
unquestionably did give to him, was in the way of training--a very
strong religious habit, and a great belief in manners. Thomas Carlyle
called her "the type of a Scottish gentlewoman," and the phrase has a
very real significance to those who realise the peculiar condition of
Scotland, one of the very few European countries where large sections
of the aristocracy are Puritans; thus a Scottish gentlewoman combines
two descriptions of dignity at the same time. Little more is known of
this lady except the fact that after her death Browning could not bear
to look at places where she had walked.
Browning's education in the formal sense reduces itself to a minimum.
In very early boyhood he attended a species of dame-school, which,
according to some of his biographers, he had apparently to leave
because he was too clever to be tolerable. However this may be, he
undoubtedly went afterwards to a school kept by Mr. Ready, at which
again he was marked chiefly by precocity. But the boy's education did
not in truth take place at any systematic seat of education; it took
place in his own home, where one of the quaintest and most learned and
most absurdly indulgent of fathers poured out in an endless stream
fantastic recitals from the Greek epics and mediaeval chronicles. If we
test the matter by the test of actual schools and universities,
Browning will appear to be almost the least educated man in English
literary history. But if we test it by the amount actually learned, we
shall think that he was perhaps the most educated man that ever lived;
that he was in fact, if anything, overeducated. In a spirited poem he
has himself described how, when he was a small child, his father used
to pile up chairs in the drawing-room and call them the city of Troy.
Browning came out of the home crammed with all kinds of
knowledge--knowledge about the Greek poets, knowledge about the
Provencal Troubadours, knowledge about the Jewish Rabbis of the Middle
Ages. But along with all this knowledge he carried one definite and
important piece of ignorance, an ignorance of the degree to which such
knowledge was exceptional. He was no spoilt and self-conscious child,
taught to regard himself as clever. In the atmosphere in which he
lived learning was a pleasure, and a natural pleasure, like sport or
wine. He had in it the pleasure of some old scholar of the Renascence,
when grammar itself was as fresh as the flowers of spring. He had no
reason to suppose that every one did not join in so admirable a game.
His sagacious destiny, while giving him knowledge of everything else,
left him in ignorance of the ignorance of the world.
Of his boyish days scarcely any important trace remains, except a kind
of diary which contains under one date the laconic statement, "Married
two wives this morning." The insane ingenuity of the biographer would
be quite capable of seeing in this a most suggestive foreshadowing of
the sexual dualism which is so ably defended in _Fifine at the Fair_.
A great part of his childhood was passed in the society of his only
sister Sariana; and it is a curious and touching fact that with her
also he passed his last days. From his earliest babyhood he seems to
have lived in a more or less stimulating mental atmosphere; but as he
emerged into youth he came under great poetic influences, which made
his father's classical poetic tradition look for the time insipid.
Browning began to live in the life of his own age.
As a young man he attended classes at University College; beyond this
there is little evidence that he was much in touch with intellectual
circles outside that of his own family. But the forces that were
moving the literary world had long passed beyond the merely literary
area. About the time of Browning's boyhood a very subtle and profound
change was beginning in the intellectual atmosphere of such homes as
that of the Brownings. In studying the careers of great men we tend
constantly to forget that their youth was generally passed and their
characters practically formed in a period long previous to their
appearance in history. We think of Milton, the Restoration Puritan,
and forget that he grew up in the living shadow of Shakespeare and the
full summer of the Elizabethan drama. We realise Garibaldi as a sudden
and almost miraculous figure rising about fifty years ago to create
the new Kingdom of Italy, and we forget that he must have formed his
first ideas of liberty while hearing at his father's dinner-table that
Napoleon was the master of Europe. Similarly, we think of Browning as
the great Victorian poet, who lived long enough to have opinions on
Mr. Gladstone's Home Rule Bill, and forget that as a young man he
passed a bookstall and saw a volume ticketed "Mr. Shelley's Atheistic
Poem," and had to search even in his own really cultivated circle for
some one who could tell him who Mr. Shelley was. Browning was, in
short, born in the afterglow of the great Revolution.
The French Revolution was at root a thoroughly optimistic thing. It
may seem strange to attribute optimism to anything so destructive;
but, in truth, this particular kind of optimism is inevitably, and by
its nature, destructive. The great dominant idea of the whole of that
period, the period before, during, and long after the Revolution, is
the idea that man would by his nature live in an Eden of dignity,
liberty and love, and that artificial and decrepit systems are keeping
him out of that Eden. No one can do the least justice to the great
Jacobins who does not realise that to them breaking the civilisation
of ages was like breaking the cords of a treasure-chest. And just as
for more than a century great men had dreamed of this beautiful
emancipation, so the dream began in the time of Keats and Shelley to
creep down among the dullest professions and the most prosaic classes
of society. A spirit of revolt was growing among the young of the
middle classes, which had nothing at all in common with the complete
and pessimistic revolt against all things in heaven or earth, which
has been fashionable among the young in more recent times. The
Shelleyan enthusiast was altogether on the side of existence; he
thought that every cloud and clump of grass shared his strict
republican orthodoxy. He represented, in short, a revolt of the normal
against the abnormal; he found himself, so to speak, in the heart of a
wholly topsy-turvy and blasphemous state of things, in which God was
rebelling against Satan. There began to arise about this time a race
of young men like Keats, members of a not highly cultivated middle
class, and even of classes lower, who felt in a hundred ways this
obscure alliance with eternal things against temporal and practical
ones, and who lived on its imaginative delight. They were a kind of
furtive universalist; they had discovered the whole cosmos, and they
kept the whole cosmos a secret. They climbed up dark stairs to meagre
garrets, and shut themselves in with the gods. Numbers of the great
men, who afterwards illuminated the Victorian era, were at this time
living in mean streets in magnificent daydreams. Ruskin was solemnly
visiting his solemn suburban aunts; Dickens was going to and fro in a
blacking factory; Carlyle, slightly older, was still lingering on a
poor farm in Dumfriesshire; Keats had not long become the assistant of
the country surgeon when Browning was a boy in Camberwell. On all
sides there was the first beginning of the aesthetic stir in the middle
classes which expressed itself in the combination of so many poetic
lives with so many prosaic livelihoods. It was the age of inspired
office-boys.
Browning grew up, then, with the growing fame of Shelley and Keats, in
the atmosphere of literary youth, fierce and beautiful, among new
poets who believed in a new world. It is important to remember this,
because the real Browning was a quite different person from the grim
moralist and metaphysician who is seen through the spectacles of
Browning Societies and University Extension Lecturers. Browning was
first and foremost a poet, a man made to enjoy all things visible and
invisible, a priest of the higher passions. The misunderstanding that
has supposed him to be other than poetical, because his form was often
fanciful and abrupt, is really different from the misunderstanding
which attaches to most other poets. The opponents of Victor Hugo
called him a mere windbag; the opponents of Shakespeare called him a
buffoon. But the admirers of Hugo and Shakespeare at least knew
better. Now the admirers and opponents of Browning alike make him out
to be a pedant rather than a poet. The only difference between the
Browningite and the anti-Browningite, is that the second says he was
not a poet but a mere philosopher, and the first says he was a
philosopher and not a mere poet. The admirer disparages poetry in
order to exalt Browning; the opponent exalts poetry in order to
disparage Browning; and all the time Browning himself exalted poetry
above all earthly things, served it with single-hearted intensity, and
stands among the few poets who hardly wrote a line of anything else.
The whole of the boyhood and youth of Robert Browning has as much the
quality of pure poetry as the boyhood and youth of Shelley. We do not
find in it any trace of the analytical Browning who is believed in by
learned ladies and gentlemen. How indeed would such sympathisers feel
if informed that the first poems that Browning wrote in a volume
called _Incondita_ were noticed to contain the fault of "too much
splendour of language and too little wealth of thought"? They were
indeed Byronic in the extreme, and Browning in his earlier appearances
in society presents himself in quite a romantic manner. Macready, the
actor, wrote of him: "He looks and speaks more like a young poet than
any one I have ever seen." A picturesque tradition remains that Thomas
Carlyle, riding out upon one of his solitary gallops necessitated by
his physical sufferings, was stopped by one whom he described as a
strangely beautiful youth, who poured out to him without preface or
apology his admiration for the great philosopher's works. Browning at
this time seems to have left upon many people this impression of
physical charm. A friend who attended University College with him
says: "He was then a bright handsome youth with long black hair
falling over his shoulders." Every tale that remains of him in
connection with this period asserts and reasserts the completely
romantic spirit by which he was then possessed. He was fond, for
example, of following in the track of gipsy caravans, far across
country, and a song which he heard with the refrain, "Following the
Queen of the Gipsies oh!" rang in his ears long enough to express
itself in his soberer and later days in that splendid poem of the
spirit of escape and Bohemianism, _The Flight of the Duchess_. Such
other of these early glimpses of him as remain, depict him as striding
across Wimbledon Common with his hair blowing in the wind, reciting
aloud passages from Isaiah, or climbing up into the elms above Norwood
to look over London by night. It was when looking down from that
suburban eyrie over the whole confounding labyrinth of London that he
was filled with that great irresponsible benevolence which is the best
of the joys of youth, and conceived the idea of a perfectly
irresponsible benevolence in the first plan of _Pippa Passes_. At the
end of his father's garden was a laburnum "heavy with its weight of
gold," and in the tree two nightingales were in the habit of singing
against each other, a form of competition which, I imagine, has since
become less common in Camberwell. When Browning as a boy was
intoxicated with the poetry of Shelley and Keats, he hypnotised
himself into something approaching to a positive conviction that these
two birds were the spirits of the two great poets who had settled in a
Camberwell garden, in order to sing to the only young gentleman who
really adored and understood them. This last story is perhaps the most
typical of the tone common to all the rest; it would be difficult to
find a story which across the gulf of nearly eighty years awakens so
vividly a sense of the sumptuous folly of an intellectual boyhood.
With Browning, as with all true poets, passion came first and made
intellectual expression, the hunger for beauty making literature as
the hunger for bread made a plough. The life he lived in those early
days was no life of dull application; there was no poet whose youth
was so young. When he was full of years and fame, and delineating in
great epics the beauty and horror of the romance of southern Europe, a
young man, thinking to please him, said, "There is no romance now
except in Italy." "Well," said Browning, "I should make an exception
of Camberwell."
Such glimpses will serve to indicate the kind of essential issue that
there was in the nature of things between the generation of Browning
and the generation of his father. Browning was bound in the nature of
things to become at the outset Byronic, and Byronism was not, of
course, in reality so much a pessimism about civilised things as an
optimism about savage things. This great revolt on behalf of the
elemental which Keats and Shelley represented was bound first of all
to occur. Robert Browning junior had to be a part of it, and Robert
Browning senior had to go back to his water colours and the faultless
couplets of Pope with the full sense of the greatest pathos that the
world contains, the pathos of the man who has produced something that
he cannot understand.
The earliest works of Browning bear witness, without exception, to
this ardent and somewhat sentimental evolution. _Pauline_ appeared
anonymously in 1833. It exhibits the characteristic mark of a juvenile
poem, the general suggestion that the author is a thousand years old.
Browning calls it a fragment of a confession; and Mr. Johnson Fox, an
old friend of Browning's father, who reviewed it for _Tait's
Magazine_, said, with truth, that it would be difficult to find
anything more purely confessional. It is the typical confession of a
boy laying bare all the spiritual crimes of infidelity and moral
waste, in a state of genuine ignorance of the fact that every one else
has committed them. It is wholesome and natural for youth to go about
confessing that the grass is green, and whispering to a priest
hoarsely that it has found a sun in heaven. But the records of that
particular period of development, even when they are as ornate and
beautiful as _Pauline_, are not necessarily or invariably wholesome
reading. The chief interest of _Pauline_, with all its beauties, lies
in a certain almost humorous singularity, the fact that Browning, of
all people, should have signalised his entrance into the world of
letters with a poem which may fairly be called morbid. But this is a
morbidity so general and recurrent that it may be called in a
contradictory phrase a healthy morbidity; it is a kind of intellectual
measles. No one of any degree of maturity in reading _Pauline_ will be
quite so horrified at the sins of the young gentleman who tells the
story as he seems to be himself. It is the utterance of that bitter
and heartrending period of youth which comes before we realise the one
grand and logical basis of all optimism--the doctrine of original sin.
The boy at this stage being an ignorant and inhuman idealist, regards
all his faults as frightful secret malformations, and it is only later
that he becomes conscious of that large and beautiful and benignant
explanation that the heart of man is deceitful above all things and
desperately wicked. That Browning, whose judgment on his own work was
one of the best in the world, took this view of _Pauline_ in after
years is quite obvious. He displayed a very manly and unique capacity
of really laughing at his own work without being in the least ashamed
of it. "This," he said of _Pauline_, "is the only crab apple that
remains of the shapely tree of life in my fool's paradise." It would
be difficult to express the matter more perfectly. Although _Pauline_
was published anonymously, its authorship was known to a certain
circle, and Browning began to form friendships in the literary world.
He had already become acquainted with two of the best friends he was
ever destined to have, Alfred Domett, celebrated in "The Guardian
Angel" and "Waring," and his cousin Silverthorne, whose death is
spoken of in one of the most perfect lyrics in the English language,
Browning's "May and Death." These were men of his own age, and his
manner of speaking of them gives us many glimpses into that splendid
world of comradeship which. Plato and Walt Whitman knew, with its
endless days and its immortal nights. Browning had a third friend
destined to play an even greater part in his life, but who belonged to
an older generation and a statelier school of manners and
scholarship. Mr. Kenyon was a schoolfellow of Browning's father, and
occupied towards his son something of the position of an irresponsible
uncle. He was a rotund, rosy old gentleman, fond of comfort and the
courtesies of life, but fond of them more for others, though much for
himself. Elizabeth Barrett in after years wrote of "the brightness of
his carved speech," which would appear to suggest that he practised
that urbane and precise order of wit which was even then
old-fashioned. Yet, notwithstanding many talents of this kind, he was
not so much an able man as the natural friend and equal of able men.
Browning's circle of friends, however, widened about this time in all
directions. One friend in particular he made, the Comte de
Ripert-Monclar, a French Royalist with whom he prosecuted with renewed
energy his studies in the mediaeval and Renaissance schools of
philosophy. It was the Count who suggested that Browning should write
a poetical play on the subject of Paracelsus. After reflection,
indeed, the Count retracted this advice on the ground that the history
of the great mystic gave no room for love. Undismayed by this terrible
deficiency, Browning caught up the idea with characteristic
enthusiasm, and in 1835 appeared the first of his works which he
himself regarded as representative--_Paracelsus_. The poem shows an
enormous advance in technical literary power; but in the history of
Browning's mind it is chiefly interesting as giving an example of a
peculiarity which clung to him during the whole of his literary life,
an intense love of the holes and corners of history. Fifty-two years
afterwards he wrote _Parleyings with certain Persons of Importance in
their Day_, the last poem published in his lifetime; and any reader
of that remarkable work will perceive that the common characteristic
of all these persons is not so much that they were of importance in
their day as that they are of no importance in ours. The same
eccentric fastidiousness worked in him as a young man when he wrote
_Paracelsus_ and _Sordello_. Nowhere in Browning's poetry can we find
any very exhaustive study of any of the great men who are the
favourites of the poet and moralist. He has written about philosophy
and ambition and music and morals, but he has written nothing about
Socrates or Caesar or Napoleon, or Beethoven or Mozart, or Buddha or
Mahomet. When he wishes to describe a political ambition he selects
that entirely unknown individual, King Victor of Sardinia. When he
wishes to express the most perfect soul of music, he unearths some
extraordinary persons called Abt Vogler and Master Hugues of
Saxe-Gotha. When he wishes to express the largest and sublimest scheme
of morals and religion which his imagination can conceive, he does not
put it into the mouth of any of the great spiritual leaders of
mankind, but into the mouth of an obscure Jewish Rabbi of the name of
Ben Ezra. It is fully in accordance with this fascinating craze of his
that when he wishes to study the deification of the intellect and the
disinterested pursuit of the things of the mind, he does not select
any of the great philosophers from Plato to Darwin, whose
investigations are still of some importance in the eyes of the world.
He selects the figure of all figures most covered with modern satire
and pity, the _a priori_ scientist of the Middle Ages and the
Renaissance. His supreme type of the human intellect is neither the
academic nor the positivist, but the alchemist. It is difficult to
imagine a turn of mind constituting a more complete challenge to the
ordinary modern point of view. To the intellect of our time the wild
investigators of the school of Paracelsus seem to be the very crown
and flower of futility, they are collectors of straws and careful
misers of dust. But for all that Browning was right. Any critic who
understands the true spirit of mediaeval science can see that he was
right; no critic can see how right he was unless he understands the
spirit of mediaeval science as thoroughly as he did. In the character
of Paracelsus, Browning wished to paint the dangers and
disappointments which attend the man who believes merely in the
intellect. He wished to depict the fall of the logician; and with a
perfect and unerring instinct he selected a man who wrote and spoke in
the tradition of the Middle Ages, the most thoroughly and even
painfully logical period that the world has ever seen. If he had
chosen an ancient Greek philosopher, it would have been open to the
critic to have said that that philosopher relied to some extent upon
the most sunny and graceful social life that ever flourished. If he
had made him a modern sociological professor, it would have been
possible to object that his energies were not wholly concerned with
truth, but partly with the solid and material satisfaction of society.
But the man truly devoted to the things of the mind was the mediaeval
magician. It is a remarkable fact that one civilisation does not
satisfy itself by calling another civilisation wicked--it calls it
uncivilised. We call the Chinese barbarians, and they call us
barbarians. The mediaeval state, like China, was a foreign
civilisation, and this was its supreme characteristic, that it cared
for the things of the mind for their own sake. To complain of the
researches of its sages on the ground that they were not materially
fruitful, is to act as we should act in telling a gardener that his
roses were not as digestible as our cabbages. It is not only true that
the mediaeval philosophers never discovered the steam-engine; it is
quite equally true that they never tried. The Eden of the Middle Ages
was really a garden, where each of God's flowers--truth and beauty and
reason--flourished for its own sake, and with its own name. The Eden
of modern progress is a kitchen garden.
It would have been hard, therefore, for Browning to have chosen a
better example for his study of intellectual egotism than Paracelsus.
Modern life accuses the mediaeval tradition of crushing the intellect;
Browning, with a truer instinct, accuses that tradition of
over-glorifying it. There is, however, another and even more important
deduction to be made from the moral of _Paracelsus_. The usual
accusation against Browning is that he was consumed with logic; that
he thought all subjects to be the proper pabulum of intellectual
disquisition; that he gloried chiefly in his own power of plucking
knots to pieces and rending fallacies in two; and that to this method
he sacrificed deliberately, and with complete self-complacency, the
element of poetry and sentiment. To people who imagine Browning to
have been this frigid believer in the intellect there is only one
answer necessary or sufficient. It is the fact that he wrote a play
designed to destroy the whole of this intellectualist fallacy at the
age of twenty-three.
_Paracelsus_ was in all likelihood Browning's introduction to the
literary world. It was many years, and even many decades, before he
had anything like a public appreciation, but a very great part of the
minority of those who were destined to appreciate him came over to his
standard upon the publication of _Paracelsus_. The celebrated John
Forster had taken up _Paracelsus_ "as a thing to slate," and had ended
its perusal with the wildest curiosity about the author and his works.
John Stuart Mill, never backward in generosity, had already interested
himself in Browning, and was finally converted by the same poem. Among
other early admirers were Landor, Leigh Hunt, Horne, Serjeant
Talfourd, and Monckton-Milnes. One man of even greater literary
stature seems to have come into Browning's life about this time, a man
for whom he never ceased to have the warmest affection and trust.
Browning was, indeed, one of the very few men of that period who got
on perfectly with Thomas Carlyle. It is precisely one of those little
things which speak volumes for the honesty and unfathomable good
humour of Browning, that Carlyle, who had a reckless contempt for most
other poets of his day, had something amounting to a real attachment
to him. He would run over to Paris for the mere privilege of dining
with him. Browning, on the other hand, with characteristic
impetuosity, passionately defended and justified Carlyle in all
companies. "I have just seen dear Carlyle," he writes on one occasion;
"catch me calling people dear in a hurry, except in a letter
beginning." He sided with Carlyle in the vexed question of the Carlyle
domestic relations, and his impression of Mrs. Carlyle was that she
was "a hard unlovable woman." As, however, it is on record that he
once, while excitedly explaining some point of mystical philosophy,
put down Mrs. Carlyle's hot kettle on the hearthrug, any frigidity
that he may have observed in her manner may possibly find a natural
explanation. His partisanship in the Carlyle affair, which was
characteristically headlong and human, may not throw much light on
that painful problem itself, but it throws a great deal of light on
the character of Browning, which was pugnaciously proud of its
friends, and had what may almost be called a lust of loyalty. Browning
was not capable of that most sagacious detachment which enabled
Tennyson to say that he could not agree that the Carlyles ought never
to have married, since if they had each married elsewhere there would
have been four miserable people instead of two.
Among the motley and brilliant crowd with which Browning had now begun
to mingle, there was no figure more eccentric and spontaneous than
that of Macready the actor. This extraordinary person, a man living
from hand to mouth in all things spiritual and pecuniary, a man
feeding upon flying emotions, conceived something like an attraction
towards Browning, spoke of him as the very ideal of a young poet, and
in a moment of peculiar excitement suggested to him the writing of a
great play. Browning was a man fundamentally indeed more steadfast and
prosaic, but on the surface fully as rapid and easily infected as
Macready. He immediately began to plan out a great historical play,
and selected for his subject "Strafford."
In Browning's treatment of the subject there is something more than a
trace of his Puritan and Liberal upbringing. It is one of the very
earliest of the really important works in English literature which
are based on the Parliamentarian reading of the incidents of the time
of Charles I. It is true that the finest element in the play is the
opposition between Strafford and Pym, an opposition so complete, so
lucid, so consistent, that it has, so to speak, something of the
friendly openness and agreement which belongs to an alliance. The two
men love each other and fight each other, and do the two things at the
same time completely. This is a great thing of which even to attempt
the description. It is easy to have the impartiality which can speak
judicially of both parties, but it is not so easy to have that larger
and higher impartiality which can speak passionately on behalf of both
parties. Nevertheless, it may be permissible to repeat that there is
in the play a definite trace of Browning's Puritan education and
Puritan historical outlook.
For _Strafford_ is, of course, an example of that most difficult of
all literary works--a political play. The thing has been achieved once
at least admirably in Shakespeare's _Julius Caesar_, and something like
it, though from a more one-sided and romantic stand-point, has been
done excellently in _L'Aiglon_. But the difficulties of such a play
are obvious on the face of the matter. In a political play the
principal characters are not merely men. They are symbols,
arithmetical figures representing millions of other men outside. It
is, by dint of elaborate stage management, possible to bring a mob
upon the boards, but the largest mob ever known is nothing but a
floating atom of the people; and the people of which the politician
has to think does not consist of knots of rioters in the street, but
of some million absolutely distinct individuals, each sitting in his
own breakfast room reading his own morning paper. To give even the
faintest suggestion of the strength and size of the people in this
sense in the course of a dramatic performance is obviously impossible.
That is why it is so easy on the stage to concentrate all the pathos
and dignity upon such persons as Charles I. and Mary Queen of Scots,
the vampires of their people, because within the minute limits of a
stage there is room for their small virtues and no room for their
enormous crimes. It would be impossible to find a stronger example
than the case of _Strafford_. It is clear that no one could possibly
tell the whole truth about the life and death of Strafford,
politically considered, in a play. Strafford was one of the greatest
men ever born in England, and he attempted to found a great English
official despotism. That is to say, he attempted to found something
which is so different from what has actually come about that we can in
reality scarcely judge of it, any more than we can judge whether it
would be better to live in another planet, or pleasanter to have been
born a dog or an elephant. It would require enormous imagination to
reconstruct the political ideals of Strafford. Now Browning, as we all
know, got over the matter in his play, by practically denying that
Strafford had any political ideals at all. That is to say, while
crediting Strafford with all his real majesty of intellect and
character, he makes the whole of his political action dependent upon
his passionate personal attachment to the King. This is
unsatisfactory; it is in reality a dodging of the great difficulty of
the political play. That difficulty, in the case of any political
problem, is, as has been said, great. It would be very hard, for
example, to construct a play about Mr. Gladstone's Home Rule Bill. It
would be almost impossible to get expressed in a drama of some five
acts and some twenty characters anything so ancient and complicated as
that Irish problem, the roots of which lie in the darkness of the age
of Strongbow, and the branches of which spread out to the remotest
commonwealths of the East and West. But we should scarcely be
satisfied if a dramatist overcame the difficulty by ascribing Mr.
Gladstone's action in the Home Rule question to an overwhelming
personal affection for Mr. Healy. And in thus basing Strafford's
action upon personal and private reasons, Browning certainly does some
injustice to the political greatness, of Strafford. To attribute Mr.
Gladstone's conversion to Home Rule to an infatuation such as that
suggested above, would certainly have the air of implying that the
writer thought the Home Rule doctrine a peculiar or untenable one.
Similarly, Browning's choice of a motive for Strafford has very much
the air of an assumption that there was nothing to be said on public
grounds for Strafford's political ideal. Now this is certainly not the
case. The Puritans in the great struggles of the reign of Charles I.
may have possessed more valuable ideals than the Royalists, but it is
a very vulgar error to suppose that they were any more idealistic. In
Browning's play Pym is made almost the incarnation of public spirit,
and Strafford of private ties. But not only may an upholder of
despotism be public-spirited, but in the case of prominent upholders
of it like Strafford he generally is. Despotism indeed, and attempts
at despotism, like that of Strafford, are a kind of disease of public
spirit. They represent, as it were, the drunkenness of responsibility.
It is when men begin to grow desperate in their love for the people,
when they are overwhelmed with the difficulties and blunders of
humanity, that they fall back upon a wild desire to manage everything
themselves. Their faith in themselves is only a disillusionment with
mankind. They are in that most dreadful position, dreadful alike in
personal and public affairs--the position of the man who has lost
faith and not lost love. This belief that all would go right if we
could only get the strings into our own hands is a fallacy almost
without exception, but nobody can justly say that it is not
public-spirited. The sin and sorrow of despotism is not that it does
not love men, but that it loves them too much and trusts them too
little. Therefore from age to age in history arise these great
despotic dreamers, whether they be Royalists or Imperialists or even
Socialists, who have at root this idea, that the world would enter
into rest if it went their way and forswore altogether the right of
going its own way. When a man begins to think that the grass will not
grow at night unless he lies awake to watch it, he generally ends
either in an asylum or on the throne of an Emperor. Of these men
Strafford was one, and we cannot but feel that Browning somewhat
narrows the significance and tragedy of his place in history by making
him merely the champion of a personal idiosyncrasy against a great
public demand. Strafford was something greater than this; if indeed,
when we come to think of it, a man can be anything greater than the
friend of another man. But the whole question is interesting, because
Browning, although he never again attacked a political drama of such
palpable importance as _Strafford_, could never keep politics
altogether out of his dramatic work. _King Victor and King Charles_,
which followed it, is a political play, the study of a despotic
instinct much meaner than that of Strafford. _Colombe's Birthday_,
again, is political as well as romantic. Politics in its historic
aspect would seem to have had a great fascination for him, as indeed
it must have for all ardent intellects, since it is the one thing in
the world that is as intellectual as the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_ and
as rapid as the Derby.
One of the favourite subjects among those who like to conduct long
controversies about Browning (and their name is legion) is the
question of whether Browning's plays, such as _Strafford_, were
successes upon the stage. As they are never agreed about what
constitutes a success on the stage, it is difficult to adjudge their
quarrels. But the general fact is very simple; such a play as
_Strafford_ was not a gigantic theatrical success, and nobody, it is
to be presumed, ever imagined that it would be. On the other hand, it
was certainly not a failure, but was enjoyed and applauded as are
hundreds of excellent plays which run only for a week or two, as many
excellent plays do, and as all plays ought to do. Above all, the
definite success which attended the representation of _Strafford_ from
the point of view of the more educated and appreciative was quite
enough to establish Browning in a certain definite literary position.
As a classical and established personality he did not come into his
kingdom for years and decades afterwards; not, indeed, until he was
near to entering upon the final rest. But as a detached and eccentric
personality, as a man who existed and who had arisen on the outskirts
of literature, the world began to be conscious of him at this time.
Of what he was personally at the period that he thus became personally
apparent, Mrs. Bridell Fox has left a very vivid little sketch. She
describes how Browning called at the house (he was acquainted with her
father), and finding that gentleman out, asked with a kind of abrupt
politeness if he might play on the piano. This touch is very
characteristic of the mingled aplomb and unconsciousness of Browning's
social manner. "He was then," she writes, "slim and dark, and very
handsome, and--may I hint it?--just a trifle of a dandy, addicted to
lemon-coloured kid gloves and such things, quite the glass of fashion
and the mould of form. But full of 'ambition,' eager for success,
eager for fame, and, what is more, determined to conquer fame and to
achieve success." That is as good a portrait as we can have of the
Browning of these days--quite self-satisfied, but not self-conscious
young man; one who had outgrown, but only just outgrown, the pure
romanticism of his boyhood, which made him run after gipsy caravans
and listen to nightingales in the wood; a man whose incandescent
vitality, now that it had abandoned gipsies and not yet immersed
itself in casuistical poems, devoted itself excitedly to trifles, such
as lemon-coloured kid gloves and fame. But a man still above all
things perfectly young and natural, professing that foppery which
follows the fashions, and not that sillier and more demoralising
foppery which defies them. Just as he walked in coolly and yet
impulsively into a private drawing-room and offered to play, so he
walked at this time into the huge and crowded salon of European
literature and offered to sing.
CHAPTER II
EARLY WORKS
In 1840 _Sordello_ was published. Its reception by the great majority
of readers, including some of the ablest men of the time, was a
reception of a kind probably unknown in the rest of literary history,
a reception that was neither praise nor blame. It was perhaps best
expressed by Carlyle, who wrote to say that his wife had read
_Sordello_ with great interest, and wished to know whether Sordello
was a man, or a city, or a book. Better known, of course, is the story
of Tennyson, who said that the first line of the poem--
"Who will, may hear Sordello's story told,"
and the last line--
"Who would, has heard Sordello's story told,"
were the only two lines in the poem that he understood, and they were
lies.
Perhaps the best story, however, of all the cycle of Sordello legends
is that which is related of Douglas Jerrold. He was recovering from an
illness; and having obtained permission for the first time to read a
little during the day, he picked up a book from a pile beside the bed
and began _Sordello_. No sooner had he done so than he turned deadly
pale, put down the book, and said, "My God! I'm an idiot. My health
is restored, but my mind's gone. I can't understand two consecutive
lines of an English poem." He then summoned his family and silently
gave the book into their hands, asking for their opinion on the poem;
and as the shadow of perplexity gradually passed over their faces, he
heaved a sigh of relief and went to sleep. These stories, whether
accurate or no, do undoubtedly represent the very peculiar reception
accorded to _Sordello_, a reception which, as I have said, bears no
resemblance whatever to anything in the way of eulogy or condemnation
that had ever been accorded to a work of art before. There had been
authors whom it was fashionable to boast of admiring and authors whom
it was fashionable to boast of despising; but with _Sordello_ enters
into literary history the Browning of popular badinage, the author
whom it is fashionable to boast of not understanding.
Putting aside for the moment the literary qualities which are to be
found in the poem, when it becomes intelligible, there is one question
very relevant to the fame and character of Browning which is raised by
_Sordello_ when it is considered, as most people consider it, as
hopelessly unintelligible. It really throws some light upon the reason
of Browning's obscurity. The ordinary theory of Browning's obscurity
is to the effect that it was a piece of intellectual vanity indulged
in more and more insolently as his years and fame increased. There are
at least two very decisive objections to this popular explanation. In
the first place, it must emphatically be said for Browning that in all
the numerous records and impressions of him throughout his long and
very public life, there is not one iota of evidence that he was a man
who was intellectually vain. The evidence is entirely the other way.
He was vain of many things, of his physical health, for example, and
even more of the physical health which he contrived to bestow for a
certain period upon his wife. From the records of his early dandyism,
his flowing hair and his lemon-coloured gloves, it is probable enough
that he was vain of his good looks. He was vain of his masculinity,
his knowledge of the world, and he was, I fancy, decidedly vain of his
prejudices, even, it might be said, vain of being vain of them. But
everything is against the idea that he was much in the habit of
thinking of himself in his intellectual aspect. In the matter of
conversation, for example, some people who liked him found him genial,
talkative, anecdotal, with a certain strengthening and sanative
quality in his mere bodily presence. Some people who did not like him
found him a mere frivolous chatterer, afflicted with bad manners. One
lady, who knew him well, said that, though he only met you in a crowd
and made some commonplace remark, you went for the rest of the day
with your head up. Another lady who did not know him, and therefore
disliked him, asked after a dinner party, "Who was that too-exuberant
financier?" These are the diversities of feeling about him. But they
all agree in one point--that he did not talk cleverly, or try to talk
cleverly, as that proceeding is understood in literary circles. He
talked positively, he talked a great deal, but he never attempted to
give that neat and aesthetic character to his speech which is almost
invariable in the case of the man who is vain of his mental
superiority. When he did impress people with mental gymnastics, it was
mostly in the form of pouring out, with passionate enthusiasm, whole
epics written by other people, which is the last thing that the
literary egotist would be likely to waste his time over. We have
therefore to start with an enormous psychological improbability that
Browning made his poems complicated from mere pride in his powers and
contempt of his readers.
There is, however, another very practical objection to the ordinary
theory that Browning's obscurity was a part of the intoxication of
fame and intellectual consideration. We constantly hear the statement
that Browning's intellectual complexity increased with his later
poems, but the statement is simply not true. _Sordello_, to the
indescribable density of which he never afterwards even approached,
was begun before _Strafford_, and was therefore the third of his
works, and even if we adopt his own habit of ignoring _Pauline_, the
second. He wrote the greater part of it when he was twenty-four. It
was in his youth, at the time when a man is thinking of love and
publicity, of sunshine and singing birds, that he gave birth to this
horror of great darkness; and the more we study the matter with any
knowledge of the nature of youth, the more we shall come to the
conclusion that Browning's obscurity had altogether the opposite
origin to that which is usually assigned to it. He was not
unintelligible because he was proud, but unintelligible because he was
humble. He was not unintelligible because his thoughts were vague, but
because to him they were obvious.
A man who is intellectually vain does not make himself
incomprehensible, because he is so enormously impressed with the
difference between his readers' intelligence and his own that he
talks down to them with elaborate repetition and lucidity. What poet
was ever vainer than Byron? What poet was ever so magnificently lucid?
But a young man of genius who has a genuine humility in his heart does
not elaborately explain his discoveries, because he does not think
that they are discoveries. He thinks that the whole street is humming
with his ideas, and that the postman and the tailor are poets like
himself. Browning's impenetrable poetry was the natural expression of
this beautiful optimism. _Sordello_ was the most glorious compliment
that has ever been paid to the average man.
In the same manner, of course, outward obscurity is in a young author
a mark of inward clarity. A man who is vague in his ideas does not
speak obscurely, because his own dazed and drifting condition leads
him to clutch at phrases like ropes and use the formulae that every one
understands. No one ever found Miss Marie Corelli obscure, because she
believes only in words. But if a young man really has ideas of his
own, he must be obscure at first, because he lives in a world of his
own in which there are symbols and correspondences and categories
unknown to the rest of the world. Let us take an imaginary example.
Suppose that a young poet had developed by himself a peculiar idea
that all forms of excitement, including religious excitement, were a
kind of evil intoxication, he might say to himself continually that
churches were in reality taverns, and this idea would become so fixed
in his mind that he would forget that no such association existed in
the minds of others. And suppose that in pursuance of this general
idea, which is a perfectly clear and intellectual idea, though a very
silly one, he were to say that he believed in Puritanism without its
theology, and were to repeat this idea also to himself until it became
instinctive and familiar, such a man might take up a pen, and under
the impression that he was saying something figurative indeed, but
quite clear and suggestive, write some such sentence as this, "You
will not get the godless Puritan into your white taverns," and no one
in the length and breadth of the country could form the remotest
notion of what he could mean. So it would have been in any example,
for instance, of a man who made some philosophical discovery and did
not realise how far the world was from it. If it had been possible for
a poet in the sixteenth century to hit upon and learn to regard as
obvious the evolutionary theory of Darwin, he might have written down
some such line as "the radiant offspring of the ape," and the maddest
volumes of mediaeval natural history would have been ransacked for the
meaning of the allusion. The more fixed and solid and sensible the
idea appeared to him, the more dark and fantastic it would have
appeared to the world. Most of us indeed, if we ever say anything
valuable, say it when we are giving expression to that part of us
which has become as familiar and invisible as the pattern on our wall
paper. It is only when an idea has become a matter of course to the
thinker that it becomes startling to the world.
It is worth while to dwell upon this preliminary point of the ground
of Browning's obscurity, because it involves an important issue about
him. Our whole view of Browning is bound to be absolutely different,
and I think absolutely false, if we start with the conception that he
was what the French call an intellectual. If we see Browning with the
eyes of his particular followers, we shall inevitably think this. For
his followers are pre-eminently intellectuals, and there never lived
upon the earth a great man who was so fundamentally different from his
followers. Indeed, he felt this heartily and even humorously himself.
"Wilkes was no Wilkite," he said, "and I am very far from being a
Browningite." We shall, as I say, utterly misunderstand Browning at
every step of his career if we suppose that he was the sort of man who
would be likely to take a pleasure in asserting the subtlety and
abstruseness of his message. He took pleasure beyond all question in
himself; in the strictest sense of the word he enjoyed himself. But
his conception of himself was never that of the intellectual. He
conceived himself rather as a sanguine and strenuous man, a great
fighter. "I was ever," as he says, "a fighter." His faults, a certain
occasional fierceness and grossness, were the faults that are counted
as virtues among navvies and sailors and most primitive men. His
virtues, boyishness and absolute fidelity, and a love of plain words
and things are the virtues which are counted as vices among the
aesthetic prigs who pay him the greatest honour. He had his more
objectionable side, like other men, but it had nothing to do with
literary egotism. He was not vain of being an extraordinary man. He
was only somewhat excessively vain of being an ordinary one.
The Browning then who published _Sordello_ we have to conceive, not as
a young pedant anxious to exaggerate his superiority to the public,
but as a hot-headed, strong-minded, inexperienced, and essentially
humble man, who had more ideas than he knew how to disentangle from
each other. If we compare, for example, the complexity of Browning
with the clarity of Matthew Arnold, we shall realise that the cause
lies in the fact that Matthew Arnold was an intellectual aristocrat,
and Browning an intellectual democrat. The particular peculiarities of
_Sordello_ illustrate the matter very significantly. A very great part
of the difficulty of _Sordello_, for instance, is in the fact that
before the reader even approaches to tackling the difficulties of
Browning's actual narrative, he is apparently expected to start with
an exhaustive knowledge of that most shadowy and bewildering of all
human epochs--the period of the Guelph and Ghibelline struggles in
mediaeval Italy. Here, of course, Browning simply betrays that
impetuous humility which we have previously observed. His father was a
student of mediaeval chronicles, he had himself imbibed that learning
in the same casual manner in which a boy learns to walk or to play
cricket. Consequently in a literary sense he rushed up to the first
person he met and began talking about Ecelo and Taurello Salinguerra
with about as much literary egotism as an English baby shows when it
talks English to an Italian organ grinder. Beyond this the poem of
_Sordello_, powerful as it is, does not present any very significant
advance in Browning's mental development on that already represented
by _Pauline_ and _Paracelsus_. _Pauline, Paracelsus_, and _Sordello_
stand together in the general fact that they are all, in the excellent
phrase used about the first by Mr. Johnson Fox, "confessional." All
three are analyses of the weakness which every artistic temperament
finds in itself. Browning is still writing about himself, a subject
of which he, like all good and brave men, was profoundly ignorant.
This kind of self-analysis is always misleading. For we do not see in
ourselves those dominant traits strong enough to force themselves out
in action which our neighbours see. We see only a welter of minute
mental experiences which include all the sins that were ever committed
by Nero or Sir Willoughby Patterne. When studying ourselves, we are
looking at a fresco with a magnifying glass. Consequently, these early
impressions which great men have given of themselves are nearly always
slanders upon themselves, for the strongest man is weak to his own
conscience, and Hamlet flourished to a certainty even inside Napoleon.
So it was with Browning, who when he was nearly eighty was destined to
write with the hilarity of a schoolboy, but who wrote in his boyhood
poems devoted to analysing the final break-up of intellect and soul.
_Sordello_, with all its load of learning, and almost more oppressive
load of beauty, has never had any very important influence even upon
Browningites, and with the rest of the world the name has passed into
a jest. The most truly memorable thing about it was Browning's saying
in answer to all gibes and misconceptions, a saying which expresses
better than anything else what genuine metal was in him, "I blame no
one, least of all myself, who did my best then and since." This is
indeed a model for all men of letters who do not wish to retain only
the letters and to lose the man.
When next Browning spoke, it was from a greater height and with a new
voice. His visit to Asolo, "his first love," as he said, "among
Italian cities," coincided with the stir and transformation in his
spirit and the breaking up of that splendid palace of mirrors in which
a man like Byron had lived and died. In 1841 _Pippa Passes_ appeared,
and with it the real Browning of the modern world. He had made the
discovery which Byron never made, but which almost every young man
does at last make--the thrilling discovery that he is not Robinson
Crusoe. _Pippa Passes_ is the greatest poem ever written, with the
exception of one or two by Walt Whitman, to express the sentiment of
the pure love of humanity. The phrase has unfortunately a false and
pedantic sound. The love of humanity is a thing supposed to be
professed only by vulgar and officious philanthropists, or by saints
of a superhuman detachment and universality. As a matter of fact, love
of humanity is the commonest and most natural of the feelings of a
fresh nature, and almost every one has felt it alight capriciously
upon him when looking at a crowded park or a room full of dancers. The
love of those whom we do not know is quite as eternal a sentiment as
the love of those whom we do know. In our friends the richness of life
is proved to us by what we have gained; in the faces in the street the
richness of life is proved to us by the hint of what we have lost. And
this feeling for strange faces and strange lives, when it is felt
keenly by a young man, almost always expresses itself in a desire
after a kind of vagabond beneficence, a desire to go through the world
scattering goodness like a capricious god. It is desired that mankind
should hunt in vain for its best friend as it would hunt for a
criminal; that he should be an anonymous Saviour, an unrecorded
Christ. Browning, like every one else, when awakened to the beauty
and variety of men, dreamed of this arrogant self-effacement. He has
written of himself that he had long thought vaguely of a being passing
through the world, obscure and unnameable, but moulding the destinies
of others to mightier and better issues. Then his almost faultless
artistic instinct came in and suggested that this being, whom he
dramatised as the work-girl, Pippa, should be even unconscious of
anything but her own happiness, and should sway men's lives with a
lonely mirth. It was a bold and moving conception to show us these
mature and tragic human groups all at the supreme moment eavesdropping
upon the solitude of a child. And it was an even more precise instinct
which made Browning make the errant benefactor a woman. A man's good
work is effected by doing what he does, a woman's by being what she
is.
There is one other point about _Pippa Passes_ which is worth a
moment's attention. The great difficulty with regard to the
understanding of Browning is the fact that, to all appearance,
scarcely any one can be induced to take him seriously as a literary
artist. His adversaries consider his literary vagaries a
disqualification for every position among poets; and his admirers
regard those vagaries with the affectionate indulgence of a circle of
maiden aunts towards a boy home for the holidays. Browning is supposed
to do as he likes with form, because he had such a profound scheme of
thought. But, as a matter of fact, though few of his followers will
take Browning's literary form seriously, he took his own literary form
very seriously. Now _Pippa Passes_ is, among other things, eminently
remarkable as a very original artistic form, a series of disconnected
but dramatic scenes which have only in common the appearance of one
figure. For this admirable literary departure Browning, amid all the
laudations of his "mind" and his "message," has scarcely ever had
credit. And just as we should, if we took Browning seriously as a
poet, see that he had made many noble literary forms, so we should
also see that he did make from time to time certain definite literary
mistakes. There is one of them, a glaring one, in _Pippa Passes_; and,
as far as I know, no critic has ever thought enough of Browning as an
artist to point it out. It is a gross falsification of the whole
beauty of _Pippa Passes_ to make the Monseigneur and his accomplice in
the last act discuss a plan touching the fate of Pippa herself. The
whole central and splendid idea of the drama is the fact that Pippa is
utterly remote from the grand folk whose lives she troubles and
transforms. To make her in the end turn out to be the niece of one of
them, is like a whiff from an Adelphi melodrama, an excellent thing in
its place, but destructive of the entire conception of Pippa. Having
done that, Browning might just as well have made Sebald turn out to be
her long lost brother, and Luigi a husband to whom she was secretly
married. Browning made this mistake when his own splendid artistic
power was only growing, and its merits and its faults in a tangle. But
its real literary merits and its real literary faults have alike
remained unrecognised under the influence of that unfortunate
intellectualism which idolises Browning as a metaphysician and
neglects him as a poet. But a better test was coming. Browning's
poetry, in the most strictly poetical sense, reached its flower in
_Dramatic Lyrics_, published in 1842. Here he showed himself a
picturesque and poignant artist in a wholly original manner. And the
two main characteristics of the work were the two characteristics most
commonly denied to Browning, both by his opponents and his followers,
passion and beauty; but beauty had enlarged her boundaries in new
modes of dramatic arrangement, and passion had found new voices in
fantastic and realistic verse. Those who suppose Browning to be a
wholly philosophic poet, number a great majority of his commentators.
But when we come to look at the actual facts, they are strangely and
almost unexpectedly otherwise.
Let any one who believes in the arrogantly intellectual character of
Browning's poetry run through the actual repertoire of the _Dramatic
Lyrics_. The first item consists of those splendid war chants called
"Cavalier Tunes." I do not imagine that any one will maintain that
there is any very mysterious metaphysical aim in them. The second item
is the fine poem "The Lost Leader," a poem which expresses in
perfectly lucid and lyrical verse a perfectly normal and old-fashioned
indignation. It is the same, however far we carry the query. What
theory does the next poem, "How they brought the Good News from Ghent
to Aix," express, except the daring speculation that it is often
exciting to ride a good horse in Belgium? What theory does the poem
after that, "Through the Metidja to Abd-el-Kadr," express, except that
it is also frequently exciting to ride a good horse in Africa? Then
comes "Nationality in Drinks," a mere technical oddity without a gleam
of philosophy; and after that those two entirely exquisite "Garden
Fancies," the first of which is devoted to the abstruse thesis that a
woman may be charming, and the second to the equally abstruse thesis
that a book may be a bore. Then comes "The Soliloquy of the Spanish
Cloister," from which the most ingenious "Browning student" cannot
extract anything except that people sometimes hate each other in
Spain; and then "The Laboratory," from which he could extract nothing
except that people sometimes hate each other in France. This is a
perfectly honest record of the poems as they stand. And the first
eleven poems read straight off are remarkable for these two obvious
characteristics--first, that they contain not even a suggestion of
anything that could be called philosophy; and second, that they
contain a considerable proportion of the best and most typical poems
that Browning ever wrote. It may be repeated that either he wrote
these lyrics because he had an artistic sense, or it is impossible to
hazard even the wildest guess as to why he wrote them.
It is permissible to say that the _Dramatic Lyrics_ represent the
arrival of the real Browning of literary history. It is true that he
had written already many admirable poems of a far more ambitious
plan--_Paracelsus_ with its splendid version of the faults of the
intellectual, _Pippa Passes_ with its beautiful deification of
unconscious influence. But youth is always ambitious and universal;
mature work exhibits more of individuality, more of the special type
and colour of work which a man is destined to do. Youth is universal,
but not individual. The genius who begins life with a very genuine and
sincere doubt whether he is meant to be an exquisite and idolised
violinist, or the most powerful and eloquent Prime Minister of modern
times, does at last end by making the discovery that there is, after
all, one thing, possibly a certain style of illustrating Nursery
Rhymes, which he can really do better than any one else. This was what
happened to Browning; like every one else, he had to discover first
the universe, and then humanity, and at last himself. With him, as
with all others, the great paradox and the great definition of life
was this, that the ambition narrows as the mind expands. In _Dramatic
Lyrics_ he discovered the one thing that he could really do better
than any one else--the dramatic lyric. The form is absolutely
original: he had discovered a new field of poetry, and in the centre
of that field he had found himself.
The actual quality, the actual originality of the form is a little
difficult to describe. But its general characteristic is the fearless
and most dexterous use of grotesque things in order to express sublime
emotions. The best and most characteristic of the poems are
love-poems; they express almost to perfection the real wonderland of
youth, but they do not express it by the ideal imagery of most poets
of love. The imagery of these poems consists, if we may take a rapid
survey of Browning's love poetry, of suburban streets, straws,
garden-rakes, medicine bottles, pianos, window-blinds, burnt cork,
fashionable fur coats. But in this new method he thoroughly expressed
the true essential, the insatiable realism of passion. If any one
wished to prove that Browning was not, as he is said to be, the poet
of thought, but pre-eminently one of the poets of passion, we could
scarcely find a better evidence of this profoundly passionate element
than Browning's astonishing realism in love poetry. There is nothing
so fiercely realistic as sentiment and emotion. Thought and the
intellect are content to accept abstractions, summaries, and
generalisations; they are content that ten acres of ground should be
called for the sake of argument X, and ten widows' incomes called for
the sake of argument Y; they are content that a thousand awful and
mysterious disappearances from the visible universe should be summed
up as the mortality of a district, or that ten thousand intoxications
of the soul should bear the general name of the instinct of sex.
Rationalism can live upon air and signs and numbers. But sentiment
must have reality; emotion demands the real fields, the real widows'
homes, the real corpse, and the real woman. And therefore Browning's
love poetry is the finest love poetry in the world, because it does
not talk about raptures and ideals and gates of heaven, but about
window-panes and gloves and garden walls. It does not deal much with
abstractions; it is the truest of all love poetry, because it does not
speak much about love. It awakens in every man the memories of that
immortal instant when common and dead things had a meaning beyond the
power of any dictionary to utter, and a value beyond the power of any
millionaire to compute. He expresses the celestial time when a man
does not think about heaven, but about a parasol. And therefore he is,
first, the greatest of love poets, and, secondly, the only optimistic
philosopher except Whitman.
The general accusation against Browning in connection with his use of
the grotesque comes in very definitely here; for in using these homely
and practical images, these allusions, bordering on what many would
call the commonplace, he was indeed true to the actual and abiding
spirit of love. In that delightful poem "Youth and Art" we have the
singing girl saying to her old lover--
"No harm! It was not my fault
If you never turned your eye's tail up
As I shook upon E _in alt_,
Or ran the chromatic scale up."
This is a great deal more like the real chaff that passes between
those whose hearts are full of new hope or of old memory than half the
great poems of the world. Browning never forgets the little details
which to a man who has ever really lived may suddenly send an arrow
through the heart. Take, for example, such a matter as dress, as it is
treated in "A Lover's Quarrel."
"See, how she looks now, dressed
In a sledging cap and vest!
'Tis a huge fur cloak--
Like a reindeer's yoke
Falls the lappet along the breast:
Sleeves for her arms to rest,
Or to hang, as my Love likes best."
That would almost serve as an order to a dressmaker, and is therefore
poetry, or at least excellent poetry of this order. So great a power
have these dead things of taking hold on the living spirit, that I
question whether any one could read through the catalogue of a
miscellaneous auction sale without coming upon things which, if
realised for a moment, would be near to the elemental tears. And if
any of us or all of us are truly optimists, and believe as Browning
did, that existence has a value wholly inexpressible, we are most
truly compelled to that sentiment not by any argument or triumphant
justification of the cosmos, but by a few of these momentary and
immortal sights and sounds, a gesture, an old song, a portrait, a
piano, an old door.
In 1843 appeared that marvellous drama _The Return of the Druses_, a
work which contains more of Browning's typical qualities exhibited in
an exquisite literary shape, than can easily be counted. We have in
_The Return of the Druses_ his love of the corners of history, his
interest in the religious mind of the East, with its almost terrifying
sense of being in the hand of heaven, his love of colour and verbal
luxury, of gold and green and purple, which made some think he must be
an Oriental himself. But, above all, it presents the first rise of
that great psychological ambition which Browning was thenceforth to
pursue. In _Pauline_ and the poems that follow it, Browning has only
the comparatively easy task of giving an account of himself. In _Pippa
Passes_ he has the only less easy task of giving an account of
humanity. In _The Return of the Druses_ he has for the first time the
task which is so much harder than giving an account of humanity--the
task of giving an account of a human being. Djabal, the great Oriental
impostor, who is the central character of the play, is a peculiarly
subtle character, a compound of blasphemous and lying assumptions of
Godhead with genuine and stirring patriotic and personal feelings: he
is a blend, so to speak, of a base divinity and of a noble humanity.
He is supremely important in the history of Browning's mind, for he is
the first of that great series of the apologiae of apparently evil men,
on which the poet was to pour out so much of his imaginative
wealth--Djabal, Fra Lippo, Bishop Blougram, Sludge, Prince
Hohenstiel-Schwangau, and the hero of _Fifine at the Fair_.
With this play, so far as any point can be fixed for the matter, he
enters for the first time on the most valuable of all his labours--the
defence of the indefensible. It may be noticed that Browning was not
in the least content with the fact that certain human frailties had
always lain more or less under an implied indulgence; that all human
sentiment had agreed that a profligate might be generous, or that a
drunkard might be high-minded. He was insatiable: he wished to go
further and show in a character like Djabal that an impostor might be
generous and that a liar might be high-minded. In all his life, it
must constantly be remembered, he tried always the most difficult
things. Just as he tried the queerest metres and attempted to manage
them, so he tried the queerest human souls and attempted to stand in
their place. Charity was his basic philosophy; but it was, as it were,
a fierce charity, a charity that went man-hunting. He was a kind of
cosmic detective who walked into the foulest of thieves' kitchens and
accused men publicly of virtue. The character of Djabal in _The Return
of the Druses_ is the first of this long series of forlorn hopes for
the relief of long surrendered castles of misconduct. As we shall see,
even realising the humanity of a noble impostor like Djabal did not
content his erratic hunger for goodness. He went further again, and
realised the humanity of a mean impostor like Sludge. But in all
things he retained this essential characteristic, that he was not
content with seeking sinners--he sought the sinners whom even sinners
cast out.
Browning's feeling of ambition in the matter of the drama continued to
grow at this time. It must be remembered that he had every natural
tendency to be theatrical, though he lacked the essential lucidity.
He was not, as a matter of fact, a particularly unsuccessful
dramatist; but in the world of abstract temperaments he was by nature
an unsuccessful dramatist. He was, that is to say, a man who loved
above all things plain and sensational words, open catastrophes, a
clear and ringing conclusion to everything. But it so happened,
unfortunately, that his own words were not plain; that his
catastrophes came with a crashing and sudden unintelligibleness which
left men in doubt whether the thing were a catastrophe or a great
stroke of good luck; that his conclusion, though it rang like a
trumpet to the four corners of heaven, was in its actual message quite
inaudible. We are bound to admit, on the authority of all his best
critics and admirers, that his plays were not failures, but we can all
feel that they should have been. He was, as it were, by nature a
neglected dramatist. He was one of those who achieve the reputation,
in the literal sense, of eccentricity by their frantic efforts to
reach the centre.
_A Blot on the 'Scutcheon_ followed _The Return of the Druses_. In
connection with the performance of this very fine play a quarrel arose
which would not be worth mentioning if it did not happen to illustrate
the curious energetic simplicity of Browning's character. Macready,
who was in desperately low financial circumstances at this time, tried
by every means conceivable to avoid playing the part; he dodged, he
shuffled, he tried every evasion that occurred to him, but it never
occurred to Browning to see what he meant. He pushed off the part upon
Phelps, and Browning was contented; he resumed it, and Browning was
only discontented on behalf of Phelps. The two had a quarrel; they
were both headstrong, passionate men, but the quarrel dealt entirely
with the unfortunate condition of Phelps. Browning beat down his own
hat over his eyes; Macready flung Browning's manuscript with a slap
upon the floor. But all the time it never occurred to the poet that
Macready's conduct was dictated by anything so crude and simple as a
desire for money. Browning was in fact by his principles and his
ideals a man of the world, but in his life far otherwise. That worldly
ease which is to most of us a temptation was to him an ideal. He was
as it were a citizen of the New Jerusalem who desired with perfect
sanity and simplicity to be a citizen of Mayfair. There was in him a
quality which can only be most delicately described; for it was a
virtue which bears a strange resemblance to one of the meanest of
vices. Those curious people who think the truth a thing that can be
said violently and with ease, might naturally call Browning a snob. He
was fond of society, of fashion and even of wealth: but there is no
snobbery in admiring these things or any things if we admire them for
the right reasons. He admired them as worldlings cannot admire them:
he was, as it were, the child who comes in with the dessert. He bore
the same relation to the snob that the righteous man bears to the
Pharisee: something frightfully close and similar and yet an
everlasting opposite.
CHAPTER III
BROWNING AND HIS MARRIAGE
Robert Browning had his faults, and the general direction of those
faults has been previously suggested. The chief of his faults, a
certain uncontrollable brutality of speech and gesture when he was
strongly roused, was destined to cling to him all through his life,
and to startle with the blaze of a volcano even the last quiet years
before his death. But any one who wishes to understand how deep was
the elemental honesty and reality of his character, how profoundly
worthy he was of any love that was bestowed upon him, need only study
one most striking and determining element in the question--Browning's
simple, heartfelt, and unlimited admiration for other people. He was
one of a generation of great men, of great men who had a certain
peculiar type, certain peculiar merits and defects. Carlyle, Tennyson,
Ruskin, Matthew Arnold, were alike in being children of a very
strenuous and conscientious age, alike in possessing its earnestness
and air of deciding great matters, alike also in showing a certain
almost noble jealousy, a certain restlessness, a certain fear of other
influences. Browning alone had no fear; he welcomed, evidently without
the least affectation, all the influences of his day. A very
interesting letter of his remains in which he describes his pleasure
in a university dinner. "Praise," he says in effect, "was given very
deservedly to Matthew Arnold and Swinburne, and to that pride of
Oxford men, Clough." The really striking thing about these three names
is the fact that they are united in Browning's praise in a way in
which they are by no means united in each other's. Matthew Arnold, in
one of his extant letters, calls Swinburne "a young pseudo-Shelley,"
who, according to Arnold, thinks he can make Greek plays good by
making them modern. Mr. Swinburne, on the other hand, has summarised
Clough in a contemptuous rhyme:--
"There was a bad poet named Clough,
Whom his friends all united to puff.
But the public, though dull,
Has not quite such a skull
As belongs to believers in Clough."
The same general fact will be found through the whole of Browning's
life and critical attitude. He adored Shelley, and also Carlyle who
sneered at him. He delighted in Mill, and also in Ruskin who rebelled
against Mill. He excused Napoleon III. and Landor who hurled
interminable curses against Napoleon. He admired all the cycle of
great men who all contemned each other. To say that he had no streak
of envy in his nature would be true, but unfair; for there is no
justification for attributing any of these great men's opinions to
envy. But Browning was really unique, in that he had a certain
spontaneous and unthinking tendency to the admiration of others. He
admired another poet as he admired a fading sunset or a chance spring
leaf. He no more thought whether he could be as good as that man in
that department than whether he could be redder than the sunset or
greener than the leaf of spring. He was naturally magnanimous in the
literal sense of that sublime word; his mind was so great that it
rejoiced in the triumphs of strangers. In this spirit Browning had
already cast his eyes round in the literary world of his time, and had
been greatly and justifiably struck with the work of a young lady
poet, Miss Barrett.
That impression was indeed amply justified. In a time when it was
thought necessary for a lady to dilute the wine of poetry to its very
weakest tint, Miss Barrett had contrived to produce poetry which was
open to literary objection as too heady and too high-coloured. When
she erred it was through an Elizabethan audacity and luxuriance, a
straining after violent metaphors. With her reappeared in poetry a
certain element which had not been present in it since the last days
of Elizabethan literature, the fusion of the most elementary human
passion with something which can only be described as wit, a certain
love of quaint and sustained similes, of parallels wildly logical, and
of brazen paradox and antithesis. We find this hot wit, as distinct
from the cold wit of the school of Pope, in the puns and buffooneries
of Shakespeare. We find it lingering in _Hudibras_, and we do not find
it again until we come to such strange and strong lines as these of
Elizabeth Barrett in her poem on Napoleon:--
"Blood fell like dew beneath his sunrise--sooth,
But glittered dew-like in the covenanted
And high-rayed light. He was a despot--granted,
But the [Greek: autos] of his autocratic mouth
Said 'Yea' i' the people's French! He magnified
The image of the freedom he denied."
Her poems are full of quaint things, of such things as the eyes in the
peacock fans of the Vatican, which she describes as winking at the
Italian tricolor. She often took the step from the sublime to the
ridiculous: but to take this step one must reach the sublime.
Elizabeth Barrett contrived to assert, what still needs but then
urgently needed assertion, the fact that womanliness, whether in life
or poetry, was a positive thing, and not the negative of manliness.
Her verse at its best was quite as strong as Browning's own, and very
nearly as clever. The difference between their natures was a
difference between two primary colours, not between dark and light
shades of the same colour.
Browning had often heard not only of the public, but of the private
life of this lady from his father's friend Kenyon. The old man, who
was one of those rare and valuable people who have a talent for
establishing definite relationships with people after a comparatively
short intercourse, had been appointed by Miss Barrett as her "fairy
godfather." He spoke much about her to Browning, and of Browning to
her, with a certain courtly garrulity which was one of his talents.
And there could be little doubt that the two poets would have met long
before had it not been for certain peculiarities in the position of
Miss Barrett. She was an invalid, and an invalid of a somewhat unique
kind, and living beyond all question under very unique circumstances.
Her father, Edward Moulton Barrett, had been a landowner in the West
Indies, and thus, by a somewhat curious coincidence, had borne a part
in the same social system which stung Browning's father into revolt
and renunciation. The parts played by Edward Barrett, however, though
little or nothing is known of it, was probably very different. He was
a man Conservative by nature, a believer in authority in the nation
and the family, and endowed with some faculties for making his
conceptions prevail. He was an able man, capable in his language of a
certain bitter felicity of phrase. He was rigidly upright and
responsible, and he had a capacity for profound affection. But
selfishness of the most perilous sort, an unconscious selfishness, was
eating away his moral foundations, as it tends to eat away those of
all despots. His most fugitive moods changed and controlled the whole
atmosphere of the house, and the state of things was fully as
oppressive in the case of his good moods as in the case of his bad
ones. He had, what is perhaps the subtlest and worst spirit of
egotism, not that spirit merely which thinks that nothing should stand
in the way of its ill-temper, but that spirit which thinks that
nothing should stand in the way of its amiability. His daughters must
be absolutely at his beck and call, whether it was to be brow-beaten
or caressed. During the early years of Elizabeth Barrett's life, the
family had lived in the country, and for that brief period she had
known a more wholesome life than she was destined ever to know again
until her marriage long afterwards. She was not, as is the general
popular idea, absolutely a congenital invalid, weak, and almost
moribund from the cradle. In early girlhood she was slight and
sensitive indeed, but perfectly active and courageous. She was a good
horsewoman, and the accident which handicapped her for so many years
afterwards happened to her when she was riding. The injury to her
spine, however, will be found, the more we study her history, to be
only one of the influences which were to darken those bedridden years,
and to have among them a far less important place than has hitherto
been attached to it. Her father moved to a melancholy house in Wimpole
Street; and his own character growing gloomier and stranger as time
went on, he mounted guard over his daughter's sickbed in a manner
compounded of the pessimist and the disciplinarian. She was not
permitted to stir from the sofa, often not even to cross two rooms to
her bed. Her father came and prayed over her with a kind of melancholy
glee, and with the avowed solemnity of a watcher by a deathbed. She
was surrounded by that most poisonous and degrading of all
atmospheres--a medical atmosphere. The existence of this atmosphere
has nothing to do with the actual nature or prolongation of disease. A
man may pass three hours out of every five in a state of bad health,
and yet regard, as Stevenson regarded, the three hours as exceptional
and the two as normal. But the curse that lay on the Barrett household
was the curse of considering ill-health the natural condition of a
human being. The truth was that Edward Barrett was living emotionally
and aesthetically, like some detestable decadent poet, upon his
daughter's decline. He did not know this, but it was so. Scenes,
explanations, prayers, fury, and forgiveness had become bread and meat
for which he hungered; and when the cloud was upon his spirit, he
would lash out at all things and every one with the insatiable cruelty
of the sentimentalist.
It is wonderful that Elizabeth Barrett was not made thoroughly morbid
and impotent by this intolerable violence and more intolerable
tenderness. In her estimate of her own health she did, of course,
suffer. It is evident that she practically believed herself to be
dying. But she was a high-spirited woman, full of that silent and
quite unfathomable kind of courage which is only found in women, and
she took a much more cheerful view of death than her father did of
life. Silent rooms, low voices, lowered blinds, long days of
loneliness, and of the sickliest kind of sympathy, had not tamed a
spirit which was swift and headlong to a fault. She could still own
with truth the magnificent fact that her chief vice was impatience,
"tearing open parcels instead of untying them;" looking at the end of
books before she had read them was, she said, incurable with her. It
is difficult to imagine anything more genuinely stirring than the
achievement of this woman, who thus contrived, while possessing all
the excuses of an invalid, to retain some of the faults of a tomboy.
Impetuosity, vividness, a certain absoluteness and urgency in her
demands, marked her in the eyes of all who came in contact with her.
In after years, when Browning had experimentally shaved his beard off,
she told him with emphatic gestures that it must be grown again "that
minute." There we have very graphically the spirit which tears open
parcels. Not in vain, or as a mere phrase, did her husband after her
death describe her as "all a wonder and a wild desire."
She had, of course, lived her second and real life in literature and
the things of the mind, and this in a very genuine and strenuous
sense. Her mental occupations were not mere mechanical accomplishments
almost as colourless as the monotony they relieved, nor were they
coloured in any visible manner by the unwholesome atmosphere in which
she breathed. She used her brains seriously; she was a good Greek
scholar, and read AEschylus and Euripides unceasingly with her blind
friend, Mr. Boyd; and she had, and retained even to the hour of her
death, a passionate and quite practical interest in great public
questions. Naturally she was not uninterested in Robert Browning, but
it does not appear that she felt at this time the same kind of fiery
artistic curiosity that he felt about her. He does appear to have felt
an attraction, which may almost be called mystical, for the
personality which was shrouded from the world by such sombre curtains.
In 1845 he addressed a letter to her in which he spoke of a former
occasion on which they had nearly met, and compared it to the
sensation of having once been outside the chapel of some marvellous
illumination and found the door barred against him. In that phrase it
is easy to see how much of the romantic boyhood of Browning remained
inside the resolute man of the world into which he was to all external
appearance solidifying. Miss Barrett replied to his letters with
charming sincerity and humour, and with much of that leisurely
self-revelation which is possible for an invalid who has nothing else
to do. She herself, with her love of quiet and intellectual
companionship, would probably have been quite happy for the rest of
her life if their relations had always remained a learned and
delightful correspondence. But she must have known very little of
Robert Browning if she imagined he would be contented with this airy
and bloodless tie. At all times of his life he was sufficiently fond
of his own way; at this time he was especially prompt and impulsive,
and he had always a great love for seeing and hearing and feeling
people, a love of the physical presence of friends, which made him
slap men on the back and hit them in the chest when he was very fond
of them. The correspondence between the two poets had not long begun
when Browning suggested something which was almost a blasphemy in the
Barrett household, that he should come and call on her as he would on
any one else. This seems to have thrown her into a flutter of fear and
doubt. She alleges all kinds of obstacles, the chief of which were her
health and the season of the year and the east winds. "If my truest
heart's wishes avail," replied Browning obstinately, "you shall laugh
at east winds yet as I do."
Then began the chief part of that celebrated correspondence which has
within comparatively recent years been placed before the world. It is
a correspondence which has very peculiar qualities and raises many
profound questions.
It is impossible to deal at any length with the picture given in these
remarkable letters of the gradual progress and amalgamation of two
spirits of great natural potency and independence, without saying at
least a word about the moral question raised by their publication and
the many expressions of disapproval which it entails. To the mind of
the present writer the whole of such a question should be tested by
one perfectly clear intellectual distinction and comparison. I am not
prepared to admit that there is or can be, properly speaking, in the
world anything that is too sacred to be known. That spiritual beauty
and spiritual truth are in their nature communicable, and that they
should be communicated, is a principle which lies at the root of every
conceivable religion. Christ was crucified upon a hill, and not in a
cavern, and the word Gospel itself involves the same idea as the
ordinary name of a daily paper. Whenever, therefore, a poet or any
similar type of man can, or conceives that he can, make all men
partakers in some splendid secret of his own heart, I can imagine
nothing saner and nothing manlier than his course in doing so. Thus it
was that Dante made a new heaven and a new hell out of a girl's nod in
the streets of Florence. Thus it was that Paul founded a civilisation
by keeping an ethical diary. But the one essential which exists in all
such cases as these is that the man in question believes that he can
make the story as stately to the whole world as it is to him, and he
chooses his words to that end. Yet when a work contains expressions
which have one value and significance when read by the people to whom
they were addressed, and an entirely different value and significance
when read by any one else, then the element of the violation of
sanctity does arise. It is not because there is anything in this world
too sacred to tell. It is rather because there are a great many things
in this world too sacred to parody. If Browning could really convey to
the world the inmost core of his affection for his wife, I see no
reason why he should not. But the objection to letters which begin "My
dear Ba," is that they do not convey anything of the sort. As far as
any third person is concerned, Browning might as well have been
expressing the most noble and universal sentiment in the dialect of
the Cherokees. Objection to the publication of such passages as that,
in short, is not the fact that they tell us about the love of the
Brownings, but that they do not tell us about it.
Upon this principle it is obvious that there should have been a
selection among the Letters, but not a selection which should exclude
anything merely because it was ardent and noble. If Browning or Mrs.
Browning had not desired any people to know that they were fond of
each other, they would not have written and published "One Word More"
or "The Sonnets from the Portuguese." Nay, they would not have been
married in a public church, for every one who is married in a church
does make a confession of love of absolutely national publicity, and
tacitly, therefore, repudiates any idea that such confessions are too
sacred for the world to know. The ridiculous theory that men should
have no noble passions or sentiments in public may have been designed
to make private life holy and undefiled, but it has had very little
actual effect except to make public life cynical and preposterously
unmeaning. But the words of a poem or the words of the English
Marriage Service, which are as fine as many poems, is a language
dignified and deliberately intended to be understood by all. If the
bride and bridegroom in church, instead of uttering those words, were
to utter a poem compounded of private allusions to the foibles of Aunt
Matilda, or of childish secrets which they would tell each other in a
lane, it would be a parallel case to the publication of some of the
Browning Letters. Why the serious and universal portions of those
Letters could not be published without those which are to us idle and
unmeaning it is difficult to understand. Our wisdom, whether expressed
in private or public, belongs to the world, but our folly belongs to
those we love.
There is at least one peculiarity in the Browning Letters which tends
to make their publication far less open to objection than almost any
other collection of love letters which can be imagined. The ordinary
sentimentalist who delights in the most emotional of magazine
interviews, will not be able to get much satisfaction out of them,
because he and many persons more acute will be quite unable to make
head or tail of three consecutive sentences. In this respect it is the
most extraordinary correspondence in the world. There seem to be only
two main rules for this form of letter-writing: the first is, that if
a sentence can begin with a parenthesis it always should; and the
second is, that if you have written from a third to half of a sentence
you need never in any case write any more. It would be amusing to
watch any one who felt an idle curiosity as to the language and
secrets of lovers opening the Browning Letters. He would probably come
upon some such simple and lucid passage as the following: "I ought to
wait, say a week at least, having killed all your mules for you,
before I shot down your dogs.... But not being Phoibos Apollon, you
are to know further that when I _did_ think I might go modestly on ...
[Greek: omoi], let me get out of this slough of a simile, never mind
with what dislocated ankles."
What our imaginary sentimentalist would make of this tender passage it
is difficult indeed to imagine. The only plain conclusion which
appears to emerge from the words is the somewhat curious one--that
Browning was in the habit of taking a gun down to Wimpole Street and
of demolishing the live stock on those somewhat unpromising premises.
Nor will he be any better enlightened if he turns to the reply of
Miss Barrett, which seems equally dominated with the great central
idea of the Browning correspondence that the most enlightening
passages in a letter consist of dots. She replies in a letter
following the above: "But if it could be possible that you should mean
to say you would show me. . . . Can it be? or am I reading this 'Attic
contraction' quite the wrong way. You see I am afraid of the
difference between flattering myself and being flattered . . . the
fatal difference. And now will you understand that I should be too
overjoyed to have revelations from the Portfolio . . . however
incarnated with blots and pen scratches . . . to be able to ask
impudently of them now? Is that plain?" Most probably she thought it
was.
With regard to Browning himself this characteristic is comparatively
natural and appropriate. Browning's prose was in any case the most
roundabout affair in the world. Those who knew him say that he would
often send an urgent telegram from which it was absolutely impossible
to gather where the appointment was, or when it was, or what was its
object. This fact is one of the best of all arguments against the
theory of Browning's intellectual conceit. A man would have to be
somewhat abnormally conceited in order to spend sixpence for the
pleasure of sending an unintelligible communication to the dislocation
of his own plans. The fact was, that it was part of the machinery of
his brain that things came out of it, as it were, backwards. The words
"tail foremost" express Browning's style with something more than a
conventional accuracy. The tail, the most insignificant part of an
animal, is also often the most animated and fantastic. An utterance of
Browning is often like a strange animal walking backwards, who
flourishes his tail with such energy that every one takes it for his
head. He was in other words, at least in his prose and practical
utterances, more or less incapable of telling a story without telling
the least important thing first. If a man who belonged to an Italian
secret society, one local branch of which bore as a badge an
olive-green ribbon, had entered his house, and in some sensational
interview tried to bribe or blackmail him, he would have told the
story with great energy and indignation, but he would have been
incapable of beginning with anything except the question of the colour
of olives. His whole method was founded both in literature and life
upon the principle of the "ex pede Herculem," and at the beginning of
his description of Hercules the foot appears some sizes larger than
the hero. It is, in short, natural enough that Browning should have
written his love letters obscurely, since he wrote his letters to his
publisher and his solicitor obscurely. In the case of Mrs. Browning it
is somewhat more difficult to understand. For she at least had, beyond
all question, a quite simple and lucent vein of humour, which does not
easily reconcile itself with this subtlety. But she was partly under
the influence of her own quality of passionate ingenuity or emotional
wit of which we have already taken notice in dealing with her poems,
and she was partly also no doubt under the influence of Browning.
Whatever was the reason, their correspondence was not of the sort
which can be pursued very much by the outside public. Their letters
may be published a hundred times over, they still remain private. They
write to each other in a language of their own, an almost
exasperatingly impressionist language, a language chiefly consisting
of dots and dashes and asterisks and italics, and brackets and notes
of interrogation. Wordsworth when he heard afterwards of their
eventual elopement said with that slight touch of bitterness he always
used in speaking of Browning, "So Robert Browning and Miss Barrett
have gone off together. I hope they understand each other--nobody else
would." It would be difficult to pay a higher compliment to a
marriage. Their common affection for Kenyon was a great element in
their lives and in their correspondence. "I have a convenient theory
to account for Mr. Kenyon," writes Browning mysteriously, "and his
otherwise unaccountable kindness to me." "For Mr. Kenyon's kindness,"
retorts Elizabeth Barrett, "no theory will account. I class it with
mesmerism for that reason." There is something very dignified and
beautiful about the simplicity of these two poets vying with each
other in giving adequate praise to the old dilettante, of whom the
world would never have heard but for them. Browning's feeling for him
was indeed especially strong and typical. "There," he said, pointing
after the old man as he left the room, "there goes one of the most
splendid men living--a man so noble in his friendship, so lavish in
his hospitality, so large-hearted and benevolent, that he deserves to
be known all over the world as 'Kenyon the Magnificent.'" There is
something thoroughly worthy of Browning at his best in this feeling,
not merely of the use of sociability, or of the charm of sociability,
but of the magnificence, the heroic largeness of real sociability.
Being himself a warm champion of the pleasures of society, he saw in
Kenyon a kind of poetic genius for the thing, a mission of
superficial philanthropy. He is thoroughly to be congratulated on the
fact that he had grasped the great but now neglected truth, that a man
may actually be great, yet not in the least able.
Browning's desire to meet Miss Barrett was received on her side, as
has been stated, with a variety of objections. The chief of these was
the strangely feminine and irrational reason that she was not worth
seeing, a point on which the seeker for an interview might be
permitted to form his own opinion. "There is nothing to see in me; nor
to hear in me.--I never learned to talk as you do in London; although
I can admire that brightness of carved speech in Mr. Kenyon and
others. If my poetry is worth anything to any eye, it is the flower of
me. I have lived most and been most happy in it, and so it has all my
colours; the rest of me is nothing but a root, fit for the ground and
dark." The substance of Browning's reply was to the effect, "I will
call at two on Tuesday."
They met on May 20, 1845. A short time afterwards he had fallen in
love with her and made her an offer of marriage. To a person in the
domestic atmosphere of the Barretts, the incident would appear to have
been paralysing. "I will tell you what I once said in jest ..." she
writes, "If a prince of El Dorado should come with a pedigree of
lineal descent from some signory in the moon in one hand and a ticket
of good behaviour from the nearest Independent chapel in the
other!--'Why, even _then_,' said my sister Arabel, 'it would not
_do_.' And she was right; we all agreed that she was right."
This may be taken as a fairly accurate description of the real state
of Mr. Barrett's mind on one subject. It is illustrative of the very
best and breeziest side of Elizabeth Barrett's character that she
could be so genuinely humorous over so tragic a condition of the human
mind.
Browning's proposals were, of course, as matters stood, of a character
to dismay and repel all those who surrounded Elizabeth Barrett. It was
not wholly a matter of the fancies of her father. The whole of her
family, and most probably the majority of her medical advisers, did
seriously believe at this time that she was unfit to be moved, to say
nothing of being married, and that a life passed between a bed and a
sofa, and avoiding too frequent and abrupt transitions even from one
to the other, was the only life she could expect on this earth. Almost
alone in holding another opinion and in urging her to a more vigorous
view of her condition, stood Browning himself. "But you are better,"
he would say; "you look so and speak so." Which of the two opinions
was right is of course a complex medical matter into which a book like
this has neither the right nor the need to enter. But this much may be
stated as a mere question of fact. In the summer of 1846 Elizabeth
Barrett was still living under the great family convention which
provided her with nothing but an elegant deathbed, forbidden to move,
forbidden to see proper daylight, forbidden to receive a friend lest
the shock should destroy her suddenly. A year or two later, in Italy,
as Mrs. Browning, she was being dragged up hill in a wine hamper,
toiling up to the crests of mountains at four o'clock in the morning,
riding for five miles on a donkey to what she calls "an inaccessible
volcanic ground not far from the stars." It is perfectly incredible
that any one so ill as her family believed her to be should have
lived this life for twenty-four hours. Something must be allowed for
the intoxication of a new tie and a new interest in life. But such
exaltations can in their nature hardly last a month, and Mrs. Browning
lived for fifteen years afterwards in infinitely better health than
she had ever known before. In the light of modern knowledge it is not
very difficult or very presumptuous, of us to guess that she had been
in her father's house to some extent inoculated with hysteria, that
strange affliction which some people speak of as if it meant the
absence of disease, but which is in truth the most terrible of all
diseases. It must be remembered that in 1846 little or nothing was
known of spine complaints such as that from which Elizabeth Barrett
suffered, less still of the nervous conditions they create, and least
of all of hysterical phenomena. In our day she would have been ordered
air and sunlight and activity, and all the things the mere idea of
which chilled the Barretts with terror. In our day, in short, it would
have been recognised that she was in the clutch of a form of neurosis
which exhibits every fact of a disease except its origin, that strange
possession which makes the body itself a hypocrite. Those who
surrounded Miss Barrett knew nothing of this, and Browning knew
nothing of it; and probably if he knew anything, knew less than they
did. Mrs. Orr says, probably with a great deal of truth, that of
ill-health and its sensations he remained "pathetically ignorant" to
his dying day. But devoid as he was alike of expert knowledge and
personal experience, without a shadow of medical authority, almost
without anything that can be formally called a right to his opinion,
he was, and remained, right. He at least saw, he indeed alone saw, to
the practical centre of the situation. He did not know anything about
hysteria or neurosis, or the influence of surroundings, but he knew
that the atmosphere of Mr. Barrett's house was not a fit thing for any
human being, alive, dying, or dead. His stand upon this matter has
really a certain human interest, since it is an example of a thing
which will from time to time occur, the interposition of the average
man to the confounding of the experts. Experts are undoubtedly right
nine times out of ten, but the tenth time comes, and we find in
military matters an Oliver Cromwell who will make every mistake known
to strategy and yet win all his battles, and in medical matters a
Robert Browning whose views have not a technical leg to stand on and
are entirely correct.
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