Robert Browning Part 17

In the autumn of 1878, after seventeen years of absence from Italy, Browning was recaptured by its charm, and henceforward to the close of his life Venice and the Venetian district became his accustomed place of summer refreshment and repose. For a time, with his sister as his companion, he paused at a hotel near the summit of the Splugen, enjoyed the mountain air, walked vigorously, and wrote, with great rapidity, says Mrs Orr, his poem of Russia, _Ivan Ivanovitch_. When a boy he had read in Bunyan's "Life and Death of Mr Badman" the story of "Old Tod", and with this still vivid in his memory, he added to his Russian tale the highly unidyllic "idyl" of English life, _Ned Bratts_. It was thus that subjects for poems suddenly presented themselves to Browning, often rising up as it were spontaneously out of the remote past. "There comes up unexpectedly," he wrote in a letter to a friend, "some subject for poetry, which has been dormant, and apparently dead, for perhaps dozens of years. A month since I wrote a poem of some two hundred lines ['Donald'] about a story I heard more than forty years ago, and never dreamed of trying to repeat, wondering how it had so long escaped me; and so it has been with my best things."[127] Before the close of September the travellers were in a rough but pleasant albergo at Asolo, which Browning had not seen since his first Italian journey more than forty years previously. "Such things," he writes, "have begun and ended with me in the interval!" Changes had taken place in the little city; yet much seemed familiar and therefore the more dreamlike. The place had indeed haunted him in his dreams; he would find himself travelling with a friend, or some mysterious stranger, when suddenly the little town sparkling in the suns.h.i.+ne would rise before him. "Look! look there is Asolo," he would cry, "do let us go there!" And always, after the way of dreams, his companions would declare it impossible and he would be hurried away.[128] From the time that he actually saw again the city that he loved this recurring dream was to come no more. He wandered through the well-known places, and seeking for an echo in the Rocca, the ruined fortress above the town, he found that it had not lost its tongue. A fortnight at Venice in a hotel where quiet and coolness were the chief attractions, prepared the way for many subsequent visits to what he afterwards called "the dearest place in the world." Everything in Venice, says Mrs Bronson, charmed him: "He found grace and beauty in the _popolo_ whom he paints so well in the Goldoni sonnet. The poorest street children were pretty in his eyes. He would admire a carpenter or a painter, who chanced to be at work in the house, and say to me 'See the fine poise of the head ... those well-cut features. You might fancy that man in the crimson robe of a Senator as you see them in Tintoret's canvas.'"

But these are reminiscences of later days. It was in 1880 that Browning made the acquaintance of his American friend Mrs Arthur Bronson, whose kind hospitalities added to the happiness of his visits to Asolo and to Venice, who received, as if it were a farewell gift, the dedication of his last volume, and who, not long before her death in 1901, published interesting articles on "Browning in Asolo" and "Browning in Venice" in _The Century Magazine_. The only years in which he did not revisit Venice were 1882, 1884 and 1886, and in each of these years his absence was occasioned by some unforeseen mis-adventure. In 1882 the floods were out, and he proceeded no farther than Verona. Could he have overcome the obstacles and reached Venice, he feared that he might have been incapable of enjoying it. For the first time in his life he was lamed by what he took for an attack of rheumatism, "caught," he says, "just before leaving St Pierre de Chartreuse, through my stupid inadvertence in sitting with a window open at my back--reading the Iliad, all my excuse!--while clad in a thin summer suit, and snow on the hills and bitterness every where."[129] In 1884 his sister's illness at first forbade travel to so considerable a distance. The two companions were received by another American friend, Mrs Bloomfield Moore, at the Villa Berry, St Moritz, and when she was summoned across the Atlantic, at her request they continued to occupy her villa. The season was past; the place deserted; but the sun shone gloriously. "We have walked every day," Browning wrote at the end of September, "morning and evening--afternoon I should say--two or three hours each excursion, the delicious mountain air surpa.s.sing any I was ever privileged to breathe.

My sister is absolutely herself again, and something over: I was hardly in want of such doctoring."[130] Two years later Miss Browning was ailing again, and they did not venture farther than Wales. At the Hand Hotel, Llangollen, they were at no great distance from Brintysilio, the summer residence of their friends Sir Theodore and Lady Martin--in earlier days the Lady Carlisle and Colombe of Browning's plays.[131] Mrs Orr notices that Browning, Liberal as he declared himself, was now very favourably impressed by the services to society of the English country gentleman. "Talk of abolis.h.i.+ng that cla.s.s of men!" he exclaimed, "they are the salt of the earth!" She adds, as worthy of remark, that he attended regularly the afternoon Sunday service in the parish church at Llantysilio, where now a tablet of Lady Martin's placing marks the spot.

Churchgoing was not his practice in London; "but I do not think," says Mrs Orr, "he ever failed in it at the Universities or in the country."

At Venice it was his custom to be present with his sister at the services of a Waldensian chapel, where "a certain eloquent pastor," as Mrs Bronson describes him, was the preacher. A year before his death Browning in a letter to Lady Martin recalls the happy season in the Vale of Llangollen--"delightful weeks--each tipped with a sweet starry Sunday at the little church leading to the House Beautiful where we took our rest of an evening spent always memorably."

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE PALAZZO GIUSTINIANI, VENICE.

_From a drawing by_ Miss N. ERICHSEN.]

Before pa.s.sing on to Venice, where repose was mingled with excitement, Browning was accustomed to seek a renewal of physical energy, after the fatigues of London, in some place not too much haunted by the English tourist, where he could walk for hours in the clear mountain air. In 1881 and 1882 it was St Pierre de Chartreuse, from which he visited the Grande Chartreuse, and heard the midnight ma.s.s; in 1883 and 1885 it was Gressoney St Jean in the Val d'Aosta--the "delightful Gressoney" of the Prologue to _Ferishtah's Fancies_, where "eggs, milk, cheese, fruit"

sufficed "for gormandizing"; in 1888 it was the yet more beautiful Primiero, near Feltre. In the previous year he had, for the second time, stayed at St Moritz. These were seasons of abounding life. St Pierre was only "a wild little clump of cottages on a mountain amid loftier mountains," with the roughest of little inns for its hotel; but its primitive arrangements suited Browning well and were bravely borne by his sister.[132] From Gressoney in September 1885 he wrote: "We are all but alone, the brief 'season' being over, and only a chance traveller turning up for a fortnight's lodging. We take our walks in the old way; two and a half hours before breakfast, three after it, in the most beautiful country I know. Yesterday the three hours pa.s.sed without our meeting a single man, woman, or child; one man only was discovered at a distance at the foot of a mountain we had climbed."[133] All things pleased him; an August snowstorm at St Moritz was made amends for by "the magnificence of the mountain and its firs black against the universal white"; it served moreover as an ill.u.s.tration of a pa.s.sage in the Iliad, the only book that accompanied him from England: "The days glide away uneventfully, _nearly_, and I breathe in the pleasant idleness at every pore. I have no few acquaintances here--nay, some old friends--but my intimates are the firs on the hillside, and the myriad b.u.t.terflies all about it, every bright wing of them under the snow to-day, which ought not to have been for a fortnight yet."[134] And from Primiero in 1888, when his strength had considerably declined, a letter tells of unabated pleasure; of mountains "which morning and evening, in turn, trans.m.u.te literally to gold," with at times a silver change; of the valley "one green luxuriance"; of the tiger-lilies in the garden above ten feet high, every bloom and every leaf faultless; and of the captive fox, "most engaging of little vixens," who, to Browning's great joy, broke her chain and escaped.[135] As each successive volume that he published seemed to him his best, so of his mountain places of abode the last always was the loveliest.

At Venice for a time the quiet Albergo dell' Universo suited Browning and his sister well, but when Mrs Bronson pressed them to accept the use of a suite of rooms in the Palazzo Giustiniani Recanati and the kind offer was accepted, the gain was considerable; and the _Palazzo_ has historical a.s.sociations dating from the fifteenth century which pleased Browning's imagination. It was his habit to rise early, and after a light breakfast to visit the Public Gardens with his sister. He had many friends--Mrs Bronson is our informant--whose wants or wishes he bore in mind--the prisoned elephant, the baboon, the kangaroo, the marmosets, the pelicans, the ostrich; three times, with strict punctuality, he made his rounds, and then returned to his apartment. At noon appeared the second and more substantial breakfast, at which Italian dishes were preferred. Browning wrote pa.s.sionately against the vivisection of animals, and strenuously declaimed against the decoration of a lady's hat with the spoils of birds--

Clothed with murder of His best Of harmless beings.

He praised G.o.d--for pleasure as he teaches us is praise--by heartily enjoying ortolans, "a dozen luscious lumps" provided by the cook of the Giustiniani-Recanati palace; to vary his own phrasing, he was

Fed with murder of His best Of harmless beings,

and laughed, innocently enough, with his good sister over the delicious "mouthfuls for cardinals."[136] As if the pleasure of the eye in beauty gained at a bird's expense were more criminal than the gusto of the tongue in lusciousness, curbed by piquancy, gained at the expense of a dozen other birds! At three o'clock came the gondola, and it was often directed to the Lido. "I walk, even in wind and rain, for a couple of hours on Lido," Browning wrote when nearly seventy, "and enjoy the break of sea on the strip of sand as much as Sh.e.l.ley did in those old days."[137] And to another friend: "You don't know how absolutely well I am after my walking, not on the mountains merely, but on the beloved Lido. Go there, if only to stand and be blown about by the sea wind."[138] At one time he even talked of completing an unfinished villa on the Lido from which "the divine sunsets" could be seen, but the dream-villa faded after the manner of such dreams. Sunsets, however, and sunrises never faded from Browning's brain. "I will not praise a cloud however bright," says Wordsworth, although no one has praised them more ardently than he. From Pippa's sunrise to the sunrises of mornings when his life drew towards its close, Browning lavished his praise upon the scenery of the sky. A pa.s.sage quoted by Mrs Orr from a letter written a little more than a year before his death is steeped in colour; when _Pippa Pa.s.ses_ becomes the prey of the annotating editor it will illuminate his page: "Every morning at six I see the sun rise.... My bedroom window commands a perfect view: the still, grey lagune, the few sea-gulls flying, the islet of S. Giorgio in deep shadow, and the clouds in a long purple rack, behind which a sort of spirit of rose burns up till presently all the rims are on fire with gold, and last of all the orb sends before it a long column of its own essence apparently: so my day begins." The sea-gulls of which this extract speaks were, Mrs Bronson tells us, a special delight to Browning. On a day of gales "he would stand at the window and watch them as they sailed to and fro, a sure sign of heavy storms in the Adriatic." To him, as he declared, they were even more interesting than the doves of St Mark.

Sometimes his walks, guided by Mrs Bronson's daughter, "the best cicerone in the world," he said, were through the narrowest by-streets of the city, where he rejoiced in the discovery, or what he supposed to be discovery, of some neglected stone of Venice. Occasionally he examined curiously the monuments of the churches. His American friend tells at length the story of a search in the Church of San Niccol for the tomb of the chieftain Salinguerra of Browning's own _Sordello_. At times he entered the bric-a-brac shops, and made a purchase of some piece of old furniture or tapestry. His rule "never to buy anything without knowing exactly what he wished to do with it" must have been interpreted liberally, for when about to move in June 1887 from Warwick Crescent to De Vere Gardens many treasures acquired in Italy were, Mrs Orr tells us, stowed away in the house which he was on the point of leaving. And the latest bibelot was always the most enchanting: "Like a child with a new toy," says Mrs Bronson, "he would carry it himself (size and weight permitting) into the gondola, rejoice over his chance in finding it, and descant eloquently upon its intrinsic merits." Thus, or with his son's a.s.sistance, came to De Vere Gardens bra.s.s lamps that had hung in Venetian chapels, the silver Jewish "Sabbath lamp," and the "four little heads"--the seasons--after which, Browning declared, he would not buy another thing for the house.[139] Returning from his walks on the Lido or wanderings through the little _calli_, he showed that unwise half-disdain, which an unenlightened masculine Herakles might have shown, for the blessedness of five o'clock tea. At dinner he was in his toilet what Mr Henry James calls the "member of society," never the poet whose necktie is a dithyramb. Good sense was his habit if not his foible. And why should we deny ourselves here the pleasure of imagining Miss Browning at these pleasant ceremonies, as Mrs Bronson describes her, wearing "beautiful gowns of rich and sombre tints, and appearing each day in a different and most dainty French cap and quaint antique jewels"? If other guests were not present, sometimes a visit to the theatre followed. The Venetian comedies of Gallina especially pleased Browning; he went to his s.p.a.cious box at the Goldoni evening after evening, and did not fail to express his thanks to his "brother dramatist" for the enjoyment he had received. In his _Toccata of Galuppi_ he had expressed the melancholy which underlies the transitory gaiety of eighteenth-century life in Venice; but he could also remember its innocent gladnesses without this sense of melancholy. When in 1883 the committee of the Goldoni monument asked Browning to contribute a poem to their Alb.u.m he immediately complied with the request. It was "scribbled off," according to Mrs Orr, while Professor Molmenti's messenger was waiting; it was ready the day after the request reached him, says Mrs Bronson, and was probably "carefully thought out before he put pen to paper." It catches, in the happiest temper, the spirit of Goldoni's sunniest plays:

There throng the People: how they come and go, Lisp the soft language, flaunt the bright garb--see-- On Piazza, Calle, under Portico And over Bridge! Dear King of Comedy, Be honoured! Thou that didst love Venice so, Venice, and we who love her, all love thee!

The brightness and lightness of southern life soothed Browning's northern strenuousness of mood. He would enumerate of a morning the crimes of "the wicked city" as revealed by the reports of the public press--a gondolier's oars had been conveyed away, a piece of linen a-dry had corrupted the virtue of some lightfingered Autolycus of the ca.n.a.ls![140] Yet all the while much of his heart remained with his native land. He could not be happy without his London daily paper; Mrs Orr tells us how deeply interested he was in the fortunes of the British expedition for the relief of General Gordon.

In 1885 Browning's son for the first time since his childhood was in Italy. With Venice he was in his father's phrase "simply infatuated."

For his son's sake, but also with the thought of a place of retreat when perhaps years should bring with them feebleness of body, Browning entered into treaty with the owner, an Austrian and an absentee, for the purchase of the Manzoni Palazzo on the Grand Ca.n.a.l. He considered it the most beautiful house in Venice. Ruskin had described it in the "Stones of Venice" as "a perfect and very rich example of Byzantine Renaissance." It wholly captured the imagination of Browning. He not only already possessed it in his dream, but was busy opening new windows to admit the morning suns.h.i.+ne, and throwing out balconies, while leaving undisturbed the rich facade with its medallions in coloured marble. The dream was never realised. The vendor, Marchese Montecucculi, hoping to secure a higher price, drew back. Browning was about to force him by legal proceedings to fulfil his bargain, when it was discovered that the walls were cracked and the foundations were untrustworthy. To his great mortification the whole scheme had to be abandoned. It was not until his son in 1888, the year after his marriage, acquired possession of the Palazzo Rezzonico--"a stately temple of the rococo" is Mr Henry James's best word for it--that Browning ceased to think with regret of the lost Manzoni. At no time, however, did he design a voluntary abandonment of his life in England. When in full expectation of becoming the owner of the Palazzo Manzoni he wrote to Dr Furnivall: "Don't think I mean to give up London till it warns me away; when the hospitalities and innumerable delights grow a burden.... Pen will have suns.h.i.+ne and beauty about him, and every help to profit by these, while I and my sister have secured a shelter when the fogs of life grow too troublesome."

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 119: Some parts of what follows on _La Saisiaz_ have already appeared in print in a forgotten article of mine on that poem.]

[Footnote 120: "An Artist's Reminiscences," by R. Lehmann (1894), p.

231.]

[Footnote 121: Thus he declaimed to Robert Buchanan against Walt Whitman's writings, with which, according to Buchanan, he had little acquaintance.]

[Footnote 122: "Autobiography of a Journalist," ii. 210.]

[Footnote 123: From the first of three valuable articles by Mr Rossetti in _The Magazine of Art_ (1890) on "Portraits of Robert Browning."]

[Footnote 124: Robert Browning, "Personalia," by Edmund Gosse, pp. 81, 82.]

[Footnote 125: Vol. ii. pp. 88, 89.]

[Footnote 126: Anna Swanwick, "A Memoir by Mary L. Bruce," pp. 130, 131.

To Dr Furnivall he often spoke of Mrs Browning.]

[Footnote 127: From Mrs Bronson's article in _The Century Magazine_, "Browning in Venice."]

[Footnote 128: Related more fully in Mrs Bronson's article "Browning in Asolo" in _The Century Magazine_.]

[Footnote 129: Mrs Bronson's "Browning in Venice" in _The Century Magazine_.]

[Footnote 130: To Dr Furnivall, Sept. 28, 1884.]

[Footnote 131: Some notices of Browning in Wales occur in Sir T.

Martin's "Life of Lady Martin."]

[Footnote 132: Letter to Dr Furnivall, August 29, 1881.]

[Footnote 133: To Dr Furnivall, Sept. 7, 1885.]

[Footnote 134: To Dr Furnivall, August 21, 1887.]

[Footnote 135: See for fuller details the letter in Mrs Orr's _Life of Browning_, pp. 407, 408.]

[Footnote 136: So described by Mrs Bronson.]

[Footnote 137: To Dr Furnivall, Oct. 11, 1881.]

[Footnote 138: Quoted by Mrs Bronson.]

[Footnote 139: Mrs Orr, "Life of Browning," p. 400.]

[Footnote 140: Mrs Bronson records this.]

Chapter XVI

Poet and Teacher in Old Age

During the last decade of his life Browning's influence as a literary power was a.s.sured. The publication indeed of _The Ring and the Book_ in 1868 did much to establish his reputation with those readers who are not watchers for a new planet but revise their astronomical charts upon authority. He noted with satisfaction that fourteen hundred copies of _Prince Hohenstiel-Schw.a.n.gau_ were sold in five days, and says of _Balaustion's Adventure_ "2500 in five months is a good sale for the likes of me." The later volumes were not perhaps more popular, but they sent readers to the earlier poems, and successive volumes of Selections made these easily accessible. That published by Moxon in 1865, and dedicated in words of admiration and friends.h.i.+p to Tennyson, by no means equalled in value the earlier Selections made by John Forster. The volume of 1872--dedicated also to Tennyson--which has been frequently reprinted, was arranged upon a principle, the reference of which to the poems chosen is far from clear--"by simply stringing together certain pieces"; Browning wrote, "on the thread of an imaginary personality, I present them in succession, rather as the natural development of a particular experience than because I account them the most noteworthy portion of my work." We can perceive that some poems of love are brought together, and some of art, and that the series closes with poems of religious thought or experience, but such an order is not strictly observed, and the "imaginary personality"--the thread--seems to be imaginary in the fullest sense of the word. Yet it is of interest to observe that something of a psychological-dramatic arrangement was at least designed. A second series of Selections followed in 1880. Browning was accepted by many admirers not only as a poet but as a prophet.

"Tennyson and I seem now to be regarded as the two kings of Brentford,"

he said laughingly in 1879.[141] The later-enthroned king was soon to have an interesting court. In 1881 The Browning Society, founded by Dr Furnivall--initiator of so much work that is invaluable to the student of our literature--and Miss E.H. Hickey, herself a poet, began its course. At first, according to Mrs Orr, Browning "treated the project as a joke," but when once he understood it to be serious, "he did not oppose it." He felt, however, that before the public he must stand aloof from its work: "as Wilkes was no Wilkeite," he wrote to Edmund Yates, "I am quite other than a Browningite." With a little nervousness as to the discretion which the Society might or might not show, he felt grateful for the interest in his writings demonstrated by persons many of whom had been unknown to him even by name. He was always ready to furnish Dr Furnivall with a note of facts or elucidation. His old admirers had made him somewhat too much of a peculiar and private possession. A propaganda of younger believers could not be unwelcome to one who had for so many years been commonly regarded as an obscure heretic--not even an heresiarch--of literature.

Other honours accompanied his old age. In 1884 he received the LL.D. of the University of Edinburgh, and again declined to be nominated for the Lord Rectors.h.i.+p of the University of St Andrews. Next year he accepted the Honorary Presidency of the Five a.s.sociated Societies of Edinburgh.

In 1886 he was appointed Foreign Correspondent to the Royal Academy, a sinecure post rendered vacant by the death of Lord Houghton. Though so vigorous in talk, Browning could not make a public speech, or he shrank from such an effort; none of the honours which he accepted were such as to put him to this test. During many years he was President of the New Shakspere Society. His veneration for Shakespeare is expressed in a sonnet ent.i.tled _The Names_, written for the Book of the Show held in the Albert Hall, May 1884, on behalf of the Fulham Road Hospital for Women; it was not included in the edition of his works which he was superintending during the last two years of his life. Browning was not wholly uninterested in the attempts made to transfer the glory of the Shakespearian drama to Bacon; he agreed with Spedding that whatever else might be a matter of doubt, it was certain that the author of the "Essays" could not have been the author of the plays. On another question it is perhaps worth recording his opinion--he could see nothing of Shakespeare, he declared, in the tragedy of _t.i.tus Andronicus_.

In 1879 appeared _Dramatic Idyls_ and in the following year _Dramatic Idyls, Second Series_. They differed in two respects from the volumes of miscellaneous poetry which Browning had previously published. Hitherto the contents of his collections of verse in the main fell into three groups--poems which were interpretations of the pa.s.sion of love, poems which dealt with art and artists, poems which were inspired by the ideas and emotions of religion. Unless we regard _Ned Bratts_ as a poem of religious experience, we may say that these themes are wholly absent from the _Dramatic Idyls_. Secondly, the short story in verse for the first time becomes predominant, or rather excludes other forms, and the short story here is in general not romantic or fantastic, but what we understand by the word "realistic." The outward body of the story is in several instances more built up by c.u.mulative details than formerly, which gives it an air of solidity or ma.s.siveness, and is less expressed through a swift selection of things essential. And this may lead a reader to suppose that the story is more a narrative of external incidents than is actually the case. In truth, though the "corporal rind" of the narrative bulks upon our view, the poet remains essentially the psychologist. The narrative interest is not evenly distributed over the whole as it is in the works of such a writer as Chaucer, who loves narrative for its own sake. There is ordinarily a crisis, a culmination, a decisive and eventful invasion or outbreak of spiritual pa.s.sion to which we are led up by all that precedes it. If the poem should be humorous, it works up to some humorous point, or surprise. The narrative is in fact a picture that hangs from a nail, and the nail here is some vivid moment of spiritual experience, or else some jest which also has its crisis. A question sometimes arises as to whether the central motive is sufficient to bear the elaborate apparatus; for the parts of the poem do not always justify themselves except by reference to their centre, in the case, for example, of _Doctor_----, the thesis is that a bad wife is stronger than death; the jest culminates at the point where the Devil upon sight of his formidable spouse flies from the bed's-head of one who is about to die, and thus allows his victim to escape the imminent death. The question, "Will the jest sustain a poem of such length?" is a fair one, and a good-natured reader will stretch a point and say that he has not after all been so ill amused, which he might also say of an Ingoldsby Legend; but even a good-natured reader will hardly return to _Doctor_ ---- with pleasure. Chaucer with as thin a jest could have made an admirable poem, for the interest would have been distributed by his lightness of touch, by his descriptive power, by slyness, by geniality, by a changeful ripple of enjoyment over the entire piece. With Browning, when we have arrived at the apex of the jest, we are fatigued by the climb, and too much out of breath to be capable of laughter. In like manner few persons except the Browning enthusiast, who is not responsible for his fervour, will a.s.sert that either the jest or the frankly cynical moral of _Pietro of Abano_ compensates for the jolting in a springless waggon over a rough road and a long. We make the acquaintance of a magician who with knowledge uninspired by love has kicks and cuffs for his reward, and the acquaintance of an astute Greek, who, at least in his dream of life, imposed upon him by the art of magic, exploits the talents of his friend Pietro, and gains the prize of his astuteness, having learnt to rule men by the potent spell of "cleverness uncurbed by conscience." The cynicism is only inverted morality, and implies that the writer is the reverse of cynical; but it lacks the attractive sub-acid flavour of a delicate cynicism, which insinuates its prophylactic virus into our veins, and the humour of the poem, ascending from stage to stage until we reach Pietro's final failure, is c.u.mbrous and mechanical.