CHESTERTON-ROBERT BROWING - BROWNING IN ITALY
Browning's confidences, what there were of them, immediately after his
wife's death were given to several women-friends; all his life,
indeed, he was chiefly intimate with women. The two most intimate of
these were his own sister, who remained with him in all his later
years, and the sister of his wife, who seven years afterwards passed
away in his presence as Elizabeth had done. The other letters, which
number only one or two, referring in any personal manner to his
bereavement are addressed to Miss Haworth and Isa Blagden. He left
Florence and remained for a time with his father and sister near
Dinard. Then he returned to London and took up his residence in
Warwick Crescent. Naturally enough, the thing for which he now chiefly
lived was the education of his son, and it is characteristic of
Browning that he was not only a very indulgent father, but an
indulgent father of a very conventional type: he had rather the
chuckling pride of the city gentleman than the educational gravity of
the intellectual.
Browning was now famous, Bells and Pomegranates, Men and Women,
Christmas Eve, and Dramatis Personae had successively glorified his
Italian period. But he was already brooding half-unconsciously on more
famous things. He has himself left on record a description of the
incident out of which grew the whole impulse and plan of his greatest
achievement. In a passage marked with all his peculiar sense of
material things, all that power of writing of stone or metal or the
fabric of drapery, so that we seem to be handling and smelling them,
he has described a stall for the selling of odds and ends of every
variety of utility and uselessness:--
"picture frames
White through the worn gilt, mirror-sconces chipped,
Bronze angel-heads once knobs attached to chests,
(Handled when ancient dames chose forth brocade)
Modern chalk drawings, studies from the nude,
Samples of stone, jet, breccia, porphyry
Polished and rough, sundry amazing busts
In baked earth, (broken, Providence be praised!)
A wreck of tapestry proudly-purposed web
When reds and blues were indeed red and blue,
Now offer'd as a mat to save bare feet
(Since carpets constitute a cruel cost).
* * * * *
Vulgarised Horace for the use of schools,
'The Life, Death, Miracles of Saint Somebody,
Saint Somebody Else, his Miracles, Death, and Life'--
With this, one glance at the lettered back of which,
And 'Stall,' cried I; a lira made it mine."
This sketch embodies indeed the very poetry of debris, and comes
nearer than any other poem has done to expressing the pathos and
picturesqueness of a low-class pawnshop. "This," which Browning bought
for a lira out of this heap of rubbish, was, of course, the old Latin
record of the criminal case of Guido Franceschini, tried for the
murder of his wife Pompilia in the year 1698. And this again, it is
scarcely necessary to say, was the ground-plan and motive of The Ring
and the Book.
Browning had picked up the volume and partly planned the poem during
his wife's lifetime in Italy. But the more he studied it, the more the
dimensions of the theme appeared to widen and deepen; and he came at
last, there can be little doubt, to regard it definitely as his
magnum opus to which he would devote many years to come. Then came
the great sorrow of his life, and he cast about him for something
sufficiently immense and arduous and complicated to keep his brain
going like some huge and automatic engine. "I mean to keep writing,"
he said, "whether I like it or not." And thus finally he took up the
scheme of the Franceschini story, and developed it on a scale with a
degree of elaboration, repetition, and management, and inexhaustible
scholarship which was never perhaps before given in the history of the
world to an affair of two or three characters. Of the larger literary
and spiritual significance of the work, particularly in reference to
its curious and original form of narration, I shall speak
subsequently. But there is one peculiarity about the story which has
more direct bearing on Browning's life, and it appears singular that
few, if any, of his critics have noticed it. This peculiarity is the
extraordinary resemblance between the moral problem involved in the
poem if understood in its essence, and the moral problem which
constituted the crisis and centre of Browning's own life. Nothing,
properly speaking, ever happened to Browning after his wife's death;
and his greatest work during that time was the telling, under alien
symbols and the veil of a wholly different story, the inner truth
about his own greatest trial and hesitation. He himself had in this
sense the same difficulty as Caponsacchi, the supreme difficulty of
having to trust himself to the reality of virtue not only without the
reward, but even without the name of virtue. He had, like Caponsacchi,
preferred what was unselfish and dubious to what was selfish and
honourable. He knew better than any man that there is little danger of
men who really know anything of that naked and homeless responsibility
seeking it too often or indulging it too much. The conscientiousness
of the law-abider is nothing in its terrors to the conscientiousness
of the conscientious law-breaker. Browning had once, for what he
seriously believed to be a greater good, done what he himself would
never have had the cant to deny, ought to be called deceit and
evasion. Such a thing ought never to come to a man twice. If he finds
that necessity twice, he may, I think, be looked at with the beginning
of a suspicion. To Browning it came once, and he devoted his greatest
poem to a suggestion of how such a necessity may come to any man who
is worthy to live.
As has already been suggested, any apparent danger that there may be
in this excusing of an exceptional act is counteracted by the perils
of the act, since it must always be remembered that this kind of act
has the immense difference from all legal acts--that it can only be
justified by success. If Browning had taken his wife to Paris, and she
had died in an hotel there, we can only conceive him saying, with the
bitter emphasis of one of his own lines, "How should I have borne me,
please?" Before and after this event his life was as tranquil and
casual a one as it would be easy to imagine; but there always remained
upon him something which was felt by all who knew him in after
years--the spirit of a man who had been ready when his time came, and
had walked in his own devotion and certainty in a position counted
indefensible and almost along the brink of murder. This great moral of
Browning, which may be called roughly the doctrine of the great hour,
enters, of course, into many poems besides The Ring and the Book,
and is indeed the mainspring of a great part of his poetry taken as a
whole. It is, of course, the central idea of that fine poem, "The
Statue and the Bust," which has given a great deal of distress to a
great many people because of its supposed invasion of recognised
morality. It deals, as every one knows, with a Duke Ferdinand and an
elopement which he planned with the bride of one of the Riccardi. The
lovers begin by deferring their flight for various more or less
comprehensible reasons of convenience; but the habit of shrinking from
the final step grows steadily upon them, and they never take it, but
die, as it were, waiting for each other. The objection that the act
thus avoided was a criminal one is very simply and quite clearly
answered by Browning himself. His case against the dilatory couple is
not in the least affected by the viciousness of their aim. His case is
that they exhibited no virtue. Crime was frustrated in them by
cowardice, which is probably the worse immorality of the two. The same
idea again may be found in that delightful lyric "Youth and Art,"
where a successful cantatrice reproaches a successful sculptor with
their failure to understand each other in their youth and poverty.
"Each life unfulfilled, you see;
It hangs still, patchy and scrappy:
We have not sighed deep, laughed free,
Starved, feasted, despaired,--been happy."
And this conception of the great hour, which breaks out everywhere in
Browning, it is almost impossible not to connect with his own internal
drama. It is really curious that this correspondence has not been
insisted on. Probably critics have been misled by the fact that
Browning in many places appears to boast that he is purely dramatic,
that he has never put himself into his work, a thing which no poet,
good or bad, who ever lived could possibly avoid doing.
The enormous scope and seriousness of The Ring and the Book occupied
Browning for some five or six years, and the great epic appeared in
the winter of 1868. Just before it was published Smith and Elder
brought out a uniform edition of all Browning's works up to that time,
and the two incidents taken together may be considered to mark the
final and somewhat belated culmination of Browning's literary fame.
The years since his wife's death, that had been covered by the writing
of The Ring and the Book, had been years of an almost feverish
activity in that and many other ways. His travels had been restless
and continued, his industry immense, and for the first time he began
that mode of life which afterwards became so characteristic of
him--the life of what is called society. A man of a shallower and more
sentimental type would have professed to find the life of
dinner-tables and soirees vain and unsatisfying to a poet, and
especially to a poet in mourning. But if there is one thing more than
another which is stirring and honourable about Browning, it is the
entire absence in him of this cant of dissatisfaction. He had the one
great requirement of a poet--he was not difficult to please. The life
of society was superficial, but it is only very superficial people who
object to the superficial. To the man who sees the marvellousness of
all things, the surface of life is fully as strange and magical as its
interior; clearness and plainness of life is fully as mysterious as
its mysteries. The young man in evening dress, pulling on his gloves,
is quite as elemental a figure as any anchorite, quite as
incomprehensible, and indeed quite as alarming.
A great many literary persons have expressed astonishment at, or even
disapproval of, this social frivolity of Browning's. Not one of these
literary people would have been shocked if Browning's interest in
humanity had led him into a gambling hell in the Wild West or a low
tavern in Paris; but it seems to be tacitly assumed that fashionable
people are not human at all. Humanitarians of a material and dogmatic
type, the philanthropists and the professional reformers go to look
for humanity in remote places and in huge statistics. Humanitarians of
a more vivid type, the Bohemian artists, go to look for humanity in
thieves' kitchens and the studios of the Quartier Latin. But
humanitarians of the highest type, the great poets and philosophers,
do not go to look for humanity at all. For them alone among all men
the nearest drawing-room is full of humanity, and even their own
families are human. Shakespeare ended his life by buying a house in
his own native town and talking to the townsmen. Browning was invited
to a great many conversaziones and private views, and did not pretend
that they bored him. In a letter belonging to this period of his life
he describes his first dinner at one of the Oxford colleges with an
unaffected delight and vanity, which reminds the reader of nothing so
much as the pride of the boy-captain of a public school if he were
invited to a similar function and received a few compliments. It may
be indeed that Browning had a kind of second youth in this
long-delayed social recognition, but at least he enjoyed his second
youth nearly as much as his first, and it is not every one who can do
that.
Of Browning's actual personality and presence in this later middle age
of his, memories are still sufficiently clear. He was a middle-sized,
well set up, erect man, with somewhat emphatic gestures, and, as
almost all testimonies mention, a curiously strident voice. The beard,
the removal of which his wife had resented with so quaint an
indignation, had grown again, but grown quite white, which, as she
said when it occurred, was a signal mark of the justice of the gods.
His hair was still fairly dark, and his whole appearance at this time
must have been very well represented by Mr. G.F. Watts's fine portrait
in the National Portrait Gallery. The portrait bears one of the many
testimonies which exist to Mr. Watts's grasp of the essential of
character, for it is the only one of the portraits of Browning in
which we get primarily the air of virility, even of animal virility,
tempered but not disguised, with a certain touch of the pallor of the
brain-worker. He looks here what he was--a very healthy man, too
scholarly to live a completely healthy life.
His manner in society, as has been more than once indicated, was that
of a man anxious, if anything, to avoid the air of intellectual
eminence. Lockhart said briefly, "I like Browning; he isn't at all
like a damned literary man." He was, according to some, upon occasion,
talkative and noisy to a fault; but there are two kinds of men who
monopolise conversation. The first kind are those who like the sound
of their own voice; the second are those who do not know what the
sound of their own voice is like. Browning was one of the latter
class. His volubility in speech had the same origin as his
voluminousness and obscurity in literature--a kind of headlong
humility. He cannot assuredly have been aware that he talked people
down or have wished to do so. For this would have been precisely a
violation of the ideal of the man of the world, the one ambition and
even weakness that he had. He wished to be a man of the world, and he
never in the full sense was one. He remained a little too much of a
boy, a little too much even of a Puritan, and a little too much of
what may be called a man of the universe, to be a man of the world.
One of his faults probably was the thing roughly called prejudice. On
the question, for example, of table-turning and psychic phenomena he
was in a certain degree fierce and irrational. He was not indeed, as
we shall see when we come to study "Sludge the Medium," exactly
prejudiced against spiritualism. But he was beyond all question
stubbornly prejudiced against spiritualists. Whether the medium Home
was or was not a scoundrel it is somewhat difficult in our day to
conjecture. But in so far as he claimed supernatural powers, he may
have been as honest a gentleman as ever lived. And even if we think
that the moral atmosphere of Home is that of a man of dubious
character, we can still feel that Browning might have achieved his
purpose without making it so obvious that he thought so. Some traces
again, though much fainter ones, may be found of something like a
subconscious hostility to the Roman Church, or at least a less full
comprehension of the grandeur of the Latin religious civilisation than
might have been expected of a man of Browning's great imaginative
tolerance. AEstheticism, Bohemianism, the irresponsibilities of the
artist, the untidy morals of Grub Street and the Latin Quarter, he
hated with a consuming hatred. He was himself exact in everything,
from his scholarship to his clothes; and even when he wore the loose
white garments of the lounger in Southern Europe, they were in their
own way as precise as a dress suit. This extra carefulness in all
things he defended against the cant of Bohemianism as the right
attitude for the poet. When some one excused coarseness or negligence
on the ground of genius, he said, "That is an error: Noblesse oblige."
Browning's prejudices, however, belonged altogether to that healthy
order which is characterised by a cheerful and satisfied ignorance. It
never does a man any very great harm to hate a thing that he knows
nothing about. It is the hating of a thing when we do know something
about it which corrodes the character. We all have a dark feeling of
resistance towards people we have never met, and a profound and manly
dislike of the authors we have never read. It does not harm a man to
be certain before opening the books that Whitman is an obscene ranter
or that Stevenson is a mere trifler with style. It is the man who can
think these things after he has read the books who must be in a fair
way to mental perdition. Prejudice, in fact, is not so much the great
intellectual sin as a thing which we may call, to coin a word,
"postjudice," not the bias before the fair trial, but the bias that
remains afterwards. With Browning's swift and emphatic nature the bias
was almost always formed before he had gone into the matter. But
almost all the men he really knew he admired, almost all the books he
had really read he enjoyed. He stands pre-eminent among those great
universalists who praised the ground they trod on and commended
existence like any other material, in its samples. He had no kinship
with those new and strange universalists of the type of Tolstoi who
praise existence to the exclusion of all the institutions they have
lived under, and all the ties they have known. He thought the world
good because he had found so many things that were good in
it--religion, the nation, the family, the social class. He did not,
like the new humanitarian, think the world good because he had found
so many things in it that were bad.
As has been previously suggested, there was something very queer and
dangerous that underlay all the good humour of Browning. If one of
these idle prejudices were broken by better knowledge, he was all the
better pleased. But if some of the prejudices that were really rooted
in him were trodden on, even by accident, such as his aversion to
loose artistic cliques, or his aversion to undignified publicity, his
rage was something wholly transfiguring and alarming, something far
removed from the shrill disapproval of Carlyle and Ruskin. It can only
be said that he became a savage, and not always a very agreeable or
presentable savage. The indecent fury which danced upon the bones of
Edward Fitzgerald was a thing which ought not to have astonished any
one who had known much of Browning's character or even of his work.
Some unfortunate persons on another occasion had obtained some of Mrs.
Browning's letters shortly after her death, and proposed to write a
Life founded upon them. They ought to have understood that Browning
would probably disapprove; but if he talked to them about it, as he
did to others, and it is exceedingly probable that he did, they must
have thought he was mad. "What I suffer with the paws of these
black-guards in my bowels you can fancy," he says. Again he writes:
"Think of this beast working away, not deeming my feelings, or those
of her family, worthy of notice. It shall not be done if I can stop
the scamp's knavery along with his breath." Whether Browning actually
resorted to this extreme course is unknown; nothing is known except
that he wrote a letter to the ambitious biographer which reduced him
to silence, probably from stupefaction.
The same peculiarity ought, as I have said, to have been apparent to
any one who knew anything of Browning's literary work. A great number
of his poems are marked by a trait of which by its nature it is more
or less impossible to give examples. Suffice it to say that it is
truly extraordinary that poets like Swinburne (who seldom uses a gross
word) should have been spoken of as if they had introduced moral
license into Victorian poetry. What the Non-conformist conscience has
been doing to have passed Browning is something difficult to imagine.
But the peculiarity of this occasional coarseness in his work is
this--that it is always used to express a certain wholesome fury and
contempt for things sickly, or ungenerous, or unmanly. The poet seems
to feel that there are some things so contemptible that you can only
speak of them in pothouse words. It would be idle, and perhaps
undesirable, to give examples; but it may be noted that the same
brutal physical metaphor is used by his Caponsacchi about the people
who could imagine Pompilia impure and by his Shakespeare in "At the
Mermaid," about the claim of the Byronic poet to enter into the heart
of humanity. In both cases Browning feels, and perhaps in a manner
rightly, that the best thing we can do with a sentiment essentially
base is to strip off its affectations and state it basely, and that
the mud of Chaucer is a great deal better than the poison of Sterne.
Herein again Browning is close to the average man; and to do the
average man justice, there is a great deal more of this Browningesque
hatred of Byronism in the brutality of his conversation than many
people suppose.
Such, roughly and as far as we can discover, was the man who, in the
full summer and even the full autumn of his intellectual powers, began
to grow upon the consciousness of the English literary world about
this time. For the first time friendship grew between him and the
other great men of his time. Tennyson, for whom he then and always
felt the best and most personal kind of admiration, came into his
life, and along with him Gladstone and Francis Palgrave. There began
to crowd in upon him those honours whereby a man is to some extent
made a classic in his lifetime, so that he is honoured even if he is
unread. He was made a Fellow of Balliol in 1867, and the homage of the
great universities continued thenceforth unceasingly until his death,
despite many refusals on his part. He was unanimously elected Lord
Rector of Glasgow University in 1875. He declined, owing to his deep
and somewhat characteristic aversion to formal public speaking, and in
1877 he had to decline on similar grounds the similar offer from the
University of St. Andrews. He was much at the English universities,
was a friend of Dr. Jowett, and enjoyed the university life at the age
of sixty-three in a way that he probably would not have enjoyed it if
he had ever been to a university. The great universities would not let
him alone, to their great credit, and he became a D.C.L. of Cambridge
in 1879, and a D.C.L. of Oxford in 1882. When he received these
honours there were, of course, the traditional buffooneries of the
undergraduates, and one of them dropped a red cotton night-cap neatly
on his head as he passed under the gallery. Some indignant
intellectuals wrote to him to protest against this affront, but
Browning took the matter in the best and most characteristic way. "You
are far too hard," he wrote in answer, "on the very harmless
drolleries of the young men. Indeed, there used to be a regularly
appointed jester, 'Filius Terrae' he was called, whose business it was
to gibe and jeer at the honoured ones by way of reminder that all
human glories are merely gilded baubles and must not be fancied
metal." In this there are other and deeper things characteristic of
Browning besides his learning and humour. In discussing anything, he
must always fall back upon great speculative and eternal ideas. Even
in the tomfoolery of a horde of undergraduates he can only see a
symbol of the ancient office of ridicule in the scheme of morals. The
young men themselves were probably unaware that they were the
representatives of the "Filius Terrae."
But the years during which Browning was thus reaping some of his late
laurels began to be filled with incidents that reminded him how the
years were passing over him. On June 20, 1866, his father had died, a
man of whom it is impossible to think without a certain emotion, a man
who had lived quietly and persistently for others, to whom Browning
owed more than it is easy to guess, to whom we in all probability
mainly owe Browning. In 1868 one of his closest friends, Arabella
Barrett, the sister of his wife, died, as her sister had done, alone
with Browning. Browning was not a superstitious man; he somewhat
stormily prided himself on the contrary; but he notes at this time "a
dream which Arabella had of Her, in which she prophesied their meeting
in five years," that is, of course, the meeting of Elizabeth and
Arabella. His friend Milsand, to whom Sordello was dedicated, died
in 1886. "I never knew," said Browning, "or ever shall know, his like
among men." But though both fame and a growing isolation indicated
that he was passing towards the evening of his days, though he bore
traces of the progress, in a milder attitude towards things, and a
greater preference for long exiles with those he loved, one thing
continued in him with unconquerable energy--there was no diminution in
the quantity, no abatement in the immense designs of his intellectual
output.
In 1871 he produced Balaustion's Adventure, a work exhibiting not
only his genius in its highest condition of power, but something more
exacting even than genius to a man of his mature and changed life,
immense investigation, prodigious memory, the thorough assimilation
of the vast literature of a remote civilisation. Balaustion's
Adventure, which is, of course, the mere framework for an English
version of the Alcestis of Euripides, is an illustration of one of
Browning's finest traits, his immeasurable capacity for a classic
admiration. Those who knew him tell us that in conversation he never
revealed himself so impetuously or so brilliantly as when declaiming
the poetry of others; and Balaustion's Adventure is a monument of
this fiery self-forgetfulness. It is penetrated with the passionate
desire to render Euripides worthily, and to that imitation are for the
time being devoted all the gigantic powers which went to make the
songs of Pippa and the last agony of Guido. Browning never put himself
into anything more powerfully or more successfully; yet it is only an
excellent translation. In the uncouth philosophy of Caliban, in the
tangled ethics of Sludge, in his wildest satire, in his most
feather-headed lyric, Browning was never more thoroughly Browning than
in this splendid and unselfish plagiarism. This revived excitement in
Greek matters; "his passionate love of the Greek language" continued
in him thenceforward till his death. He published more than one poem
on the drama of Hellas. Aristophanes' Apology came out in 1875, and
The Agamemnon of AEschylus, another paraphrase, in 1877. All three
poems are marked by the same primary characteristic, the fact that the
writer has the literature of Athens literally at his fingers' ends. He
is intimate not only with their poetry and politics, but with their
frivolity and their slang; he knows not only Athenian wisdom, but
Athenian folly; not only the beauty of Greece, but even its vulgarity.
In fact, a page of Aristophanes' Apology is like a page of
Aristophanes, dark with levity and as obscure as a schoolman's
treatise, with its load of jokes.
In 1871 also appeared Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau: Saviour of
Society, one of the finest and most picturesque of all Browning's
apologetic monologues. The figure is, of course, intended for Napoleon
III., whose Empire had just fallen, bringing down his country with it.
The saying has been often quoted that Louis Napoleon deceived Europe
twice--once when he made it think he was a noodle, and once when he
made it think he was a statesman. It might be added that Europe was
never quite just to him, and was deceived a third time, when it took
him after his fall for an exploded mountebank and nonentity. Amid the
general chorus of contempt which was raised over his weak and
unscrupulous policy in later years, culminating in his great disaster,
there are few things finer than this attempt of Browning's to give the
man a platform and let him speak for himself. It is the apologia of a
political adventurer, and a political adventurer of a kind peculiarly
open to popular condemnation. Mankind has always been somewhat
inclined to forgive the adventurer who destroys or re-creates, but
there is nothing inspiring about the adventurer who merely preserves.
We have sympathy with the rebel who aims at reconstruction, but there
is something repugnant to the imagination in the rebel who rebels in
the name of compromise. Browning had to defend, or rather to
interpret, a man who kidnapped politicians in the night and deluged
the Montmartre with blood, not for an ideal, not for a reform, not
precisely even for a cause, but simply for the establishment of a
regime. He did these hideous things not so much that he might be
able to do better ones, but that he and every one else might be able
to do nothing for twenty years; and Browning's contention, and a very
plausible contention, is that the criminal believed that his crime
would establish order and compromise, or, in other words, that he
thought that nothing was the very best thing he and his people could
do. There is something peculiarly characteristic of Browning in thus
selecting not only a political villain, but what would appear the most
prosaic kind of villain. We scarcely ever find in Browning a defence
of those obvious and easily defended publicans and sinners whose
mingled virtues and vices are the stuff of romance and melodrama--the
generous rake, the kindly drunkard, the strong man too great for
parochial morals. He was in a yet more solitary sense the friend of
the outcast. He took in the sinners whom even sinners cast out. He
went with the hypocrite and had mercy on the Pharisee.
How little this desire of Browning's, to look for a moment at the
man's life with the man's eyes, was understood, may be gathered from
the criticisms on Hohenstiel-Schwangau, which, says Browning, "the
Editor of the Edinburgh Review calls my eulogium on the Second
Empire, which it is not, any more than what another wiseacre affirms
it to be, a scandalous attack on the old constant friend of England.
It is just what I imagine the man might, if he pleased, say for
himself."
In 1873 appeared Red-Cotton Night-Cap Country, which, if it be not
absolutely one of the finest of Browning's poems, is certainly one of
the most magnificently Browningesque. The origin of the name of the
poem is probably well known. He was travelling along the Normandy
coast, and discovered what he called
"Meek, hitherto un-Murrayed bathing-places,
Best loved of sea-coast-nook-full Normandy!"
Miss Thackeray, who was of the party, delighted Browning beyond
measure by calling the sleepy old fishing district "White Cotton
Night-Cap Country." It was exactly the kind of elfish phrase to which
Browning had, it must always be remembered, a quite unconquerable
attraction. The notion of a town of sleep, where men and women walked
about in nightcaps, a nation of somnambulists, was the kind of thing
that Browning in his heart loved better than Paradise Lost. Some
time afterwards he read in a newspaper a very painful story of
profligacy and suicide which greatly occupied the French journals in
the year 1871, and which had taken place in the same district. It is
worth noting that Browning was one of those wise men who can perceive
the terrible and impressive poetry of the police-news, which is
commonly treated as vulgarity, which is dreadful and may be
undesirable, but is certainly not vulgar. From The Ring and the Book
to Red-Cotton Night-Cap Country a great many of his works might be
called magnificent detective stories. The story is somewhat ugly, and
its power does not alter its ugliness, for power can only make
ugliness uglier. And in this poem there is little or nothing of the
revelation of that secret wealth of valour and patience in humanity
which makes real and redeems the revelation of its secret vileness in
The Ring and the Book. It almost looks at first sight as if Browning
had for a moment surrendered the whole of his impregnable
philosophical position and admitted the strange heresy that a human
story can be sordid. But this view of the poem is, of course, a
mistake. It was written in something which, for want of a more exact
word, we must call one of the bitter moods of Browning; but the
bitterness is entirely the product of a certain generous hostility
against the class of morbidities which he really detested, sometimes
more than they deserved. In this poem these principles of weakness and
evil are embodied to him as the sicklier kind of Romanism, and the
more sensual side of the French temperament. We must never forget what
a great deal of the Puritan there remained in Browning to the end.
This outburst of it is fierce and ironical, not in his best spirit. It
says in effect, "You call this a country of sleep, I call it a country
of death. You call it 'White Cotton Night-Cap Country'; I call it 'Red
Cotton Night-Cap Country.'"
Shortly before this, in 1872, he had published Fifine at the Fair,
which his principal biographer, and one of his most uncompromising
admirers, calls a piece of perplexing cynicism. Perplexing it may be
to some extent, for it was almost impossible to tell whether Browning
would or would not be perplexing even in a love-song or a post-card.
But cynicism is a word that cannot possibly be applied with any
propriety to anything that Browning ever wrote. Cynicism denotes that
condition of mind in which we hold that life is in its nature mean and
arid; that no soul contains genuine goodness, and no state of things
genuine reliability. Fifine at the Fair, like Prince
Hohenstiel-Schwangau, is one of Browning's apologetic
soliloquies--the soliloquy of an epicurean who seeks half-playfully
to justify upon moral grounds an infidelity into which he afterwards
actually falls. This casuist, like all Browning's casuists, is given
many noble outbursts and sincere moments, and therefore apparently the
poem is called cynical. It is difficult to understand what particular
connection there is between seeing good in nobody and seeing good even
in a sensual fool.
After Fifine at the Fair appeared the Inn Album, in 1875, a purely
narrative work, chiefly interesting as exhibiting in yet another place
one of Browning's vital characteristics, a pleasure in retelling and
interpreting actual events of a sinister and criminal type; and after
the Inn Album came what is perhaps the most preposterously
individual thing he ever wrote, Of Pacchiarotto, and How He Worked in
Distemper, in 1876. It is impossible to call the work poetry, and it
is very difficult indeed to know what to call it. Its chief
characteristic is a kind of galloping energy, an energy that has
nothing intellectual or even intelligible about it, a purely animal
energy of words. Not only is it not beautiful, it is not even clever,
and yet it carries the reader away as he might be carried away by
romping children. It ends up with a voluble and largely unmeaning
malediction upon the poet's critics, a malediction so outrageously
good-humoured that it does not take the trouble even to make itself
clear to the objects of its wrath. One can compare the poem to nothing
in heaven or earth, except to the somewhat humorous, more or less
benevolent, and most incomprehensible catalogues of curses and oaths
which may be heard from an intoxicated navvy. This is the kind of
thing, and it goes on for pages:--
"Long after the last of your number
Has ceased my front-court to encumber
While, treading down rose and ranunculus,
You Tommy-make-room-for-your-uncle-us!
Troop, all of you man or homunculus,
Quick march! for Xanthippe, my housemaid,
If once on your pates she a souse made
With what, pan or pot, bowl or skoramis,
First comes to her hand--things were more amiss!
I would not for worlds be your place in--
Recipient of slops from the basin!
You, Jack-in-the-Green, leaf-and-twiggishness
Won't save a dry thread on your priggishness!"
You can only call this, in the most literal sense of the word, the
brute-force of language.
In spite however of this monstrosity among poems, which gives its
title to the volume, it contains some of the most beautiful verses
that Browning ever wrote in that style of light philosophy in which he
was unequalled. Nothing ever gave so perfectly and artistically what
is too loosely talked about as a thrill, as the poem called "Fears and
Scruples," in which a man describes the mystifying conduct of an
absent friend, and reserves to the last line the climax--
"Hush, I pray you!
What if this friend happen to be--God."
It is the masterpiece of that excellent but much-abused literary
quality, Sensationalism.
The volume entitled Pacchiarotto, moreover, includes one or two of
the most spirited poems on the subject of the poet in relation to
publicity--"At the Mermaid," "House," and "Shop."
In spite of his increasing years, his books seemed if anything to
come thicker and faster. Two were published in 1878--La Saisiaz, his
great metaphysical poem on the conception of immortality, and that
delightfully foppish fragment of the ancien regime, The Two Poets
of Croisic. Those two poems would alone suffice to show that he had
not forgotten the hard science of theology or the harder science of
humour. Another collection followed in 1879, the first series of
Dramatic Idylls, which contain such masterpieces as "Pheidippides"
and "Ivan Ivanovitch." Upon its heels, in 1880, came the second series
of Dramatic Idylls, including "Muleykeh" and "Clive," possibly the
two best stories in poetry, told in the best manner of story-telling.
Then only did the marvellous fountain begin to slacken in quantity,
but never in quality. Jocoseria did not appear till 1883. It
contains among other things a cast-back to his very earliest manner in
the lyric of "Never the Time and the Place," which we may call the
most light-hearted love-song that was ever written by a man over
seventy. In the next year appeared Ferishtah's Fancies, which
exhibit some of his shrewdest cosmic sagacity, expressed in some of
his quaintest and most characteristic images. Here perhaps more than
anywhere else we see that supreme peculiarity of Browning--his sense
of the symbolism of material trifles. Enormous problems, and yet more
enormous answers, about pain, prayer, destiny, liberty, and conscience
are suggested by cherries, by the sun, by a melon-seller, by an eagle
flying in the sky, by a man tilling a plot of ground. It is this
spirit of grotesque allegory which really characterises Browning among
all other poets. Other poets might possibly have hit upon the same
philosophical idea--some idea as deep, as delicate, and as spiritual.
But it may be safely asserted that no other poet, having thought of a
deep, delicate, and spiritual idea, would call it "A Bean Stripe; also
Apple Eating."
Three more years passed, and the last book which Browning published in
his lifetime was Parleyings with Certain People of Importance in
their Day, a book which consists of apostrophes, amicable, furious,
reverential, satirical, emotional to a number of people of whom the
vast majority even of cultivated people have never heard in their
lives--Daniel Bartoli, Francis Furini, Gerard de Lairesse, and Charles
Avison. This extraordinary knowledge of the fulness of history was a
thing which never ceased to characterise Browning even when he was
unfortunate in every other literary quality. Apart altogether from
every line he ever wrote, it may fairly be said that no mind so rich
as his ever carried its treasures to the grave. All these later poems
are vigorous, learned, and full-blooded. They are thoroughly
characteristic of their author. But nothing in them is quite so
characteristic of their author as this fact, that when he had
published all of them, and was already near to his last day, he turned
with the energy of a boy let out of school, and began, of all things
in the world, to re-write and improve "Pauline," the boyish poem that
he had written fifty-five years before. Here was a man covered with
glory and near to the doors of death, who was prepared to give himself
the elaborate trouble of reconstructing the mood, and rebuilding the
verses of a long juvenile poem which had been forgotten for fifty
years in the blaze of successive victories. It is such things as these
which give to Browning an interest of personality which is far beyond
the more interest of genius. It was of such things that Elizabeth
Barrett wrote in one of her best moments of insight--that his genius
was the least important thing about him.
During all these later years, Browning's life had been a quiet and
regular one. He always spent the winter in Italy and the summer in
London, and carried his old love of precision to the extent of never
failing day after day throughout the year to leave the house at the
same time. He had by this time become far more of a public figure than
he had ever been previously, both in England and Italy. In 1881, Dr.
Furnivall and Miss E.H. Hickey founded the famous "Browning Society."
He became President of the new "Shakespeare Society" and of the
"Wordsworth Society." In 1886, on the death of Lord Houghton, he
accepted the post of Foreign Correspondent to the Royal Academy. When
he moved to De Vere Gardens in 1887, it began to be evident that he
was slowly breaking up. He still dined out constantly; he still
attended every reception and private view; he still corresponded
prodigiously, and even added to his correspondence; and there is
nothing more typical of him than that now, when he was almost already
a classic, he answered any compliment with the most delightful vanity
and embarrassment. In a letter to Mr. George Bainton, touching style,
he makes a remark which is an excellent criticism on his whole
literary career: "I myself found many forgotten fields which have
proved the richest of pastures." But despite his continued energy, his
health was gradually growing worse. He was a strong man in a muscular,
and ordinarily in a physical sense, but he was also in a certain sense
a nervous man, and may be said to have died of brain-excitement
prolonged through a lifetime. In these closing years he began to feel
more constantly the necessity for rest. He and his sister went to live
at a little hotel in Llangollen, and spent hours together talking and
drinking tea on the lawn. He himself writes in one of his quaint and
poetic phrases that he had come to love these long country retreats,
"another term of delightful weeks, each tipped with a sweet starry
Sunday at the little church." For the first time, and in the last two
or three years, he was really growing old. On one point he maintained
always a tranquil and unvarying decision. The pessimistic school of
poetry was growing up all round him; the decadents, with their belief
that art was only a counting of the autumn leaves, were approaching
more and more towards their tired triumph and their tasteless
popularity. But Browning would not for one instant take the scorn of
them out of his voice. "Death, death, it is this harping on death that
I despise so much. In fiction, in poetry, French as well as English,
and I am told in American also, in art and literature, the shadow of
death, call it what you will, despair, negation, indifference, is upon
us. But what fools who talk thus! Why, amico mio, you know as well
as I, that death is life, just as our daily momentarily dying body is
none the less alive, and ever recruiting new forces of existence.
Without death, which is our church-yardy crape-like word for change,
for growth, there could be no prolongation of that which we call life.
Never say of me that I am dead."
On August 13, 1888, he set out once more for Italy, the last of his
innumerable voyages. During his last Italian period he seems to have
fallen back on very ultimate simplicities, chiefly a mere staring at
nature. The family with whom he lived kept a fox cub, and Browning
would spend hours with it watching its grotesque ways; when it
escaped, he was characteristically enough delighted. The old man could
be seen continually in the lanes round Asolo, peering into hedges and
whistling for the lizards.
This serene and pastoral decline, surely the mildest of slopes into
death, was suddenly diversified by a flash of something lying far
below. Browning's eye fell upon a passage written by the distinguished
Edward Fitzgerald, who had been dead for many years, in which
Fitzgerald spoke in an uncomplimentary manner of Elizabeth Barrett
Browning. Browning immediately wrote the "Lines to Edward Fitzgerald,"
and set the whole literary world in an uproar. The lines were bitter
and excessive to have been written against any man, especially bitter
and excessive to have been written against a man who was not alive to
reply. And yet, when all is said, it is impossible not to feel a
certain dark and indescribable pleasure in this last burst of the old
barbaric energy. The mountain had been tilled and forested, and laid
out in gardens to the summit; but for one last night it had proved
itself once more a volcano, and had lit up all the plains with its
forgotten fire. And the blow, savage as it was, was dealt for that
great central sanctity--the story of a man's youth. All that the old
man would say in reply to every view of the question was, "I felt as
if she had died yesterday."
Towards December of 1889 he moved to Venice, where he fell ill. He
took very little food; it was indeed one of his peculiar small fads
that men should not take food when they are ill, a matter in which he
maintained that the animals were more sagacious. He asserted
vigorously that this somewhat singular regimen would pull him through,
talked about his plans, and appeared cheerful. Gradually, however, the
talking became more infrequent, the cheerfulness passed into a kind of
placidity; and without any particular crisis or sign of the end,
Robert Browning died on December 12, 1889. The body was taken on board
ship by the Venice Municipal Guard, and received by the Royal Italian
marines. He was buried in the Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey, the
choir singing his wife's poem, "He giveth His beloved sleep." On the
day that he died Asolando was published.
CHESTERTON-ROBERT BROWING - BROWNING IN ITALY