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Ebook has 413 lines and 113497 words, and 9 pages

CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH

Ancestry--Parents--Boyhood--Influence of Shelley--Pauline

PARACELSUS AND SORDELLO

Visit to Russia--Paracelsus--His failures and attainments--Sordello, a companion poem--Its obscurity--Imaginative qualities--The history of a soul

THE MAKER OF PLAYS

New acquaintances--Hatcham--Macready--Strafford--Venice--Bells and Promegranates--A Blot on the 'Scutcheon--Characters of passion--Characters of intellect

Women of the dramas--Dramatic style--Pippa Passes--Dramatic Lyrics and Romances--Poems of Love and of Art

LOVE AND MARRIAGE

First letters to Miss Barrett--Meeting--Progress in friendship--Obstacles--Marriage

EARLY YEARS IN ITALY

Correspondence of R.B. and E.B.B.--Journey to Italy--Pisa--Florence--Vallombrosa--Italian politics--Casa Guidi-Friends--Son born--Death of Browning's mother--Wanderings.

CHRISTMAS EVE AND EASTER DAY

Publication--Movements of Religious Thought--Dissent--Catholicism--Criticism--Difficulties of Christian life--Imaginative power of the poems--In Venice--Paris--England--Paris again--Coup d'?tat

FROM 1851 TO 1855

Essay on Shelley--New acquaintances--Milsand--George Sand--London--Casa Guidi--Spiritualism--Mr Sludge the Medium--Baths of Lucca--Rome--London--Tennyson's Maud

MEN AND WOMEN

Rossetti's admiration--Beauty before teaching--The poet behind his poems--Isolated poems--Groups--Poems of love--Poems of Art--Poems of Religion

CLOSE OF MRS BROWNING'S LIFE

Paris--Kenyon's death--Legacies--Death of Mr Barrett--Winter in Florence--Havre--Rome--Louis Napoleon--Landor--Siena--Poems before Congress--Rome again--Modelling in Clay--Casa Guidi--Death of Mrs Browning

LONDON: DRAMATIS PERSONAE

Desolation--Return to London--Pornic--Social life--Dramatis Personae--Poems of music--Poems of hope and aspiration--A Death in the Desert--Epilogue--Caliban upon Setebos--Poems of Love

THE RING AND THE BOOK

Holiday excursions--Sainte Marie--Miss Barrett dies--Balliol College and Jowett--Origin of the Ring and the Book--Its Plan--The Persons--Count Guido--Pompilia--Caponsacchi--The Pope--Falsehood subserving truth

POEMS ON CLASSICAL SUBJECTS

Saint-Aubin--Milsand--Miss Thackeray--Herv? Riel--Miss Egerton-Smith--Summer wanderings--Balaustion's Adventure--Aristophanes' Apology--The Agamemnon

PROBLEM AND NARRATIVE POEMS

Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau--Fifine at the Fair--Red Cotton Night-Cap Country--The Inn Album--Pachiarotto and other Poems

SOLITUDE AND SOCIETY

La Saisiaz--Immortality--Two Poets of Croisic--Browning in society--Daily habits--Browning as a talker--Italy--Asolo--Mountain retreats--Mrs Bronson--Venice

POET AND TEACHER IN OLD AGE

Popularity--Browning Society--Public honours--Dramatic Idyls--Spirit of acquiescence--Jocoseria--Ferishtah's Fancies

CLOSING WORKS AND DAYS

Parleyings--Asolando--Mrs Bronson--At Asolo--Venice--Death--Place in nineteenth-century poetry

Childhood and Youth

The ancestry of Robert Browning has been traced to an earlier Robert who lived in the service of Sir John Bankes of Corfe Castle, and died in 1746. His eldest son, Thomas, "was granted a lease for three lives of the little inn, in the little hamlet of East Woodyates and parish of Pentridge, nine miles south-west of Salisbury on the road to Exeter." Robert, born in 1749, the son of this Thomas, and grandfather of the poet, became a clerk in the Bank of England, and rose to be principal in the Bank Stock Office. At the age of twenty-nine he married Margaret Tittle, a lady born in the West Indies and possessed of West Indian property. He is described by Mrs Orr as an able, energetic, and worldly man. He lived until his grandson was twenty-one years old. His first wife was the mother of another Robert, the poet's father, born in 1781. When the boy had reached the age of seven he lost his mother, and five years later his father married again. This younger Robert when a youth desired to become an artist, but such a career was denied to him. He longed for a University education, and, through the influence of his stepmother, this also was refused. They shipped the young man to St Kitts, purposing that he should oversee the West Indian estate. There, as Browning on the authority of his mother told Miss Barrett, "he conceived such a hatred to the slave-system ... that he relinquished every prospect, supported himself while there in some other capacity, and came back, while yet a boy, to his father's profound astonishment and rage." At the age of twenty-two he obtained a clerkship in the Bank of England, an employment which, his son says, he always detested. Eight years later he married Sarah Anna, daughter of William Wiedemann, a Dundee shipowner, who was the son of a German merchant of Hamburg. The young man's father, on hearing that his son was a suitor to Miss Wiedemann, had waited benevolently on her uncle "to assure him that his niece would be thrown away on a man so evidently born to be hanged." In 1811 the new-married pair settled in Camberwell, and there in a house in Southampton Street Robert Browning--an only son--was born on May 7, 1812. Two years later his sister, Sarah Anna--an only daughter--known in later years as Sarianna, a form adopted by her father, was born. She survived her brother, dying in Venice on the morning of April 22, 1903.

The attachment of Robert Browning to his mother--"the true type of a Scottish gentlewoman," said Carlyle--was deep and intimate. For him she was, in his own phrase, "a divine woman"; her death in 1849 was to Browning almost an overwhelming blow. She was of a nature finely and delicately strung. Her nervous temperament seems to have been transmitted--robust as he was in many ways--to her son. The love of music, which her Scottish-German father possessed in a high degree, leaping over a generation, reappeared in Robert Browning. His capacity for intimate friendships with animals--spider and toad and lizard--was surely an inheritance from his mother. Mr Stillman received from Browning's sister an account of her mother's unusual power over both wild creatures and household pets. "She could lure the butterflies in the garden to her," which reminds us of Browning's whistling for lizards at Asolo. A fierce bull-dog intractable to all others, to her was docile and obedient. In her domestic ways she was gentle yet energetic. Her piety was deep and pure. Her husband had been in his earlier years a member of the Anglican communion; she was brought up in the Scottish kirk. Before her marriage she became a member of the Independent congregation, meeting for worship at York Street, Lock's Fields, Walworth, where now stands the Robert Browning Hall. Her husband attached himself to the same congregation; both were teachers in the Sunday School. Mrs Browning kept, until within a few years of her death, a missionary box for contributions to the London Missionary Society. The conditions of membership implied the acceptance of "those views of doctrinal truth which for the sake of distinction are called Calvinistic." Thus over the poet's childhood and youth a religious influence presided; it was not sacerdotal, nor was it ascetic; the boy was in those early days, as he himself declared, "passionately religious." Their excellent pastor was an entirely "unimaginative preacher of the Georgian era," who held fast by the approved method of "three heads and a conclusion." Browning's indifference to the ministrations of Mr Clayton was not concealed, and on one occasion he received a rebuke in the presence of the congregation. Yet the spirit of religion which surrounded and penetrated him was to remain with him, under all its modifications, to the end. "His face," wrote the Rev. Edward White, "is vividly present to my memory through the sixty years that have intervened. It was the most wonderful face in the whole congregation--pale, somewhat mysterious, and shaded with black, flowing hair, but a face whose expression you remember through a life-time. Scarcely less memorable were the countenances of his father, mother and sister."

The finer influence of Shelley upon the genius of Browning in his youth proceeded from something quite other than those doctrinaire abstractions--the formulas of revolution--which Shelley had caught up from Godwin and certain French thinkers of the eighteenth century. Browning's spirit from first to last was one which was constantly reaching upward through the attainments of earth to something that lay beyond them. A climbing spirit, such as his, seemed to perceive in Shelley a spirit that not only climbed but soared. He could in those early days have addressed to Shelley words written later, and suggested, one cannot but believe, by his feeling for his wife:

You must be just before, in fine, See and make me see, for your part, New depths of the Divine!

Shelley opened up for his young and enthusiastic follower new vistas leading towards the infinite, towards the unattainable Best. Browning's only piece of prose criticism--apart from scattered comments in his letters--is the essay introductory to that volume of letters erroneously ascribed to Shelley, which was published when Browning was but little under forty years old. It expresses his mature feelings and convictions; and these doubtless contain within them as their germ the experience of his youth. Shelley appears to him as a poet gifted with a fuller perception of nature and man than that of the average mind, and striving to embody the thing he perceives "not so much with reference to the many below, as to the One above him, the supreme Intelligence which apprehends all things in their absolute truth--an ultimate view ever aspired to, if but partially attained, by the poet's own soul." If Shelley was deficient in some subordinate powers which support and reinforce the purely poetic gifts, he possessed the highest faculty and in this he lived and had his being. "His spirit invariably saw and spoke from the last height to which it had attained." What was "his noblest and predominating characteristic" as a poet? Browning attempts to give it definition: it was "his simultaneous perception of Power and Love in the absolute, and of Beauty and Good in the concrete, while he throws, from his poet's station between both, swifter, subtler, and more numerous films for the connexion of each with each, than have been thrown by any modern artificer of whom I have knowledge." In other words it was Shelley's special function to fling an aerial bridge from reality, as we commonly understand that word, to the higher reality which we name the ideal; to set up an aerial ladder--not less solid because it is aerial--upon the earth, whose top reached to heaven. Such was Browning's conception of Shelley, and it pays little regard either to atheistic theory or vegetarian practice.

'Tis he, I ken the manner of his gait; He rises on the toe; that spirit of his In aspiration lifts him from the earth.

The aspiration in Browning's later verse is a complex of many forces; here it is a simple poetic enthusiasm.

Two incidents in the history of a soul--studied by the speaker under the wavering lights of his hectic malady and fluctuating moods of passion--are dealt with in a singularly interesting and original way. He describes, with strange and beautiful imagery, the cynical, bitter pleasure--few of us do not know it--which the intellectual faculties sometimes derive from mocking and drawing down to their own level the spiritual powers, the intuitive powers, which are higher than they, higher, yet less capable of justification or verification by the common tests of sense and understanding. The witchcraft of the brain degrades the god in us:

And then I was a young witch whose blue eyes, As she stood naked by the river springs, Drew down a god: I watched his radiant form Growing less radiant, and it gladdened me.

First went my hopes of perfecting mankind, Next--faith in them, and then in freedom's self And virtue's self, then my own motives, ends, And aims and loves, and human love went last. I felt this no decay, because new powers Rose as old feelings left--wit, mockery, Light-heartedness; for I had oft been sad, Mistrusting my resolves, but now I cast Hope joyously away; I laughed and said "No more of this!"

FOOTNOTES:

Paracelsus and Sordello

In 1842 or 1843 he wrote a drama in five acts to which was given the name "Only a Player-girl"; the manuscript lay for long in his portfolio and never saw the light. "It was Russian," he tells Miss Barrett, "and about a fair on the Neva, and booths and droshkies and fish-pies and so forth, with the Palaces in the background." Late in life, at Venice, Browning became acquainted with an old Russian, Prince Gagarin, with whom he competed successfully for an hour in recalling folk-songs and national airs of Russia caught up during the visit of 1833-34. "His memory," said Gagarin, "is better than my own, on which I have hitherto piqued myself not a little." Perhaps it was his wanderings abroad that made Browning at this time desire further wanderings. He thought of a diplomatic career, and felt some regret when he failed to obtain an appointment for which he had applied in connection with a mission to Persia.

Paracelsus, as presented in the poem, is a man of pre-eminent genius, passionate intellect, and inordinate intellectual ambition. If it is meant that he should be the type of the modern man of science, Browning has missed his mark, for Paracelsus is in fact almost as much the poet as the man of science; but it is true that the cautious habits of the inductive student of nature were rare among the enthusiastic speculators of Renaissance days, and the Italian successor of Paracelsus--Giordano Bruno--was in reality, in large measure, what Browning has here conceived and exhibited. Paracelsus is a great revolutionary spirit in an epoch of intellectual revolution; it is as much his task to destroy as to build up; he has broken with the past, and gazes with wild-eyed hopes into the future, expecting the era of intellectual liberty to dawn suddenly with the year One, and seeing in himself the protagonist of revolution. Such men as Paracelsus, whether their sphere be in the political, the religious, or the intellectual world, are men of faith; a task has been laid on each of them; a summons, a divine mandate, has been heard. But is the summons authentic? is the mandate indeed divine? In the quiet garden at W?rzburg, while the autumn sun sinks behind St Saviour's spire, Festus--the faithful Horatio to this Hamlet of science--puts his questions and raises his doubts first as to the end and aim of Paracelsus, his aspiration towards absolute knowledge, and secondly, as to the means proposed for its attainment--means which reject the service of all predecessors in the paths of knowledge; which depart so widely from the methods of his contemporaries; which seek for truth through strange and casual revelations; which leave so much to chance. Very nobly has Browning represented the overmastering force of that faith which genius has in itself, and which indeed is needed to sustain it in the struggle with an incredulous or indifferent world. The end itself is justified by the mandate of God; and as for the means, truth is not to be found only or chiefly by gathering up stray fragments from without; truth lies buried within the soul, as jewels in the mine, and the chances and changes and shocks of life are required to open a passage for the shining forth of this inner light. Festus is overpowered less by reason than by the passion of faith in his younger and greater fellow-student; and the gentle Michal is won from her prophetic fears half by her affectionate loyalty to the man, half by the glow and inspiration of one who seems to be a surer prophet than her mistrusting self. And in truth the summons to Paracelsus is authentic; he is to be a torch-bearer in the race. His errors are his own, errors of the egoism of genius in an age of intellectual revolution; he casts away the past, and that is not wise, that is not legitimate; he anticipates for himself the full attainment of knowledge, which belongs not to him but to humanity during revolving centuries; and although he sets before himself the service of man as the outcome of all his labours--and this is well--at the same time he detaches himself from his fellow-men, regards them from a regal height, would decline even their tribute of gratitude, and would be the lofty benefactor rather than the loving helpmate of his brethren. Is it meant then that Paracelsus ought to have contented himself with being like his teacher Trithemius and the common masters of the schools? No, for these rested with an easy self-satisfaction in their poor attainments, and he is called upon to press forward, and advance from strength to strength, through attainment or through failure to renewed and unending endeavour. His dissatisfaction, his failure is a better thing than their success and content in that success. But why should he hope in his own person to forestall the slow advance of humanity, and why should the service of the brain be alienated from the service of the heart?

For a poet to depict a poet in poetry is a hazardous experiment; in regarding one's own trade a sense of humour and a little wholesome cynicism are not amiss. These could find no place in Browning's presentation of Aprile, but it is certain that Browning himself was a much more complex person than the dying lover of love who became the instructor of Paracelsus. When the scene shifts from Constantinople to Basil, and the illustrious Professor holds converse with Festus by the blazing logs deep into the night, and at length morning arises "clouded, wintry, desolate and cold," we listen with unflagging attention and entire imaginative conviction; and, when silence ensues, a wonder comes upon us as to where a young man of three-and-twenty acquired this knowledge of the various bitter tastes of life which belong to maturer experience, and how he had mastered such precocious worldly wisdom. Paracelsus,

The wondrous Paracelsus, life's dispenser, Fate's commissary, idol of the schools And courts,

chews upon his worldly success and extracts its acrid juices. This is not the romantic melancholy of youth, which dreams of infinite things, but the pain of manhood, which feels the limitations of life, which can laugh at the mockery of attainment, which is sensible of the shame that dwells at the heart of glory, yet which already has begun to hanker after the mean delights of the world, and cannot dispense with the sorry pleasures of self-degradation. The kind, calm Pastor of Einsiedeln sees at first only the splendour that hangs around the name of his early comrade, the hero of his hopes. And Paracelsus for a while would forbear with tender ruth to shatter his friend's illusion, would veil, if that were possible, the canker which has eaten into his own heart. But in the tumult of old glad memories and present griefs, it ceases to be possible; from amid the crew of foolish praisers he must find one friend having the fidelity of genuine insight; he must confess his failure, and once for all correct the prophecy of Michal that success would come and with it wretchedness--

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