Robert Browning - The Complete Works of Robert Browning - Poems, Plays, Letters & Biographies in One Edition

The inspirations of Asolo and Venice appear in ‘Pippa Passes’ and ‘In a Gondola’; but the latter poem showed, to Mr. Browning’s subsequent vexation, that Venice had been imperfectly seen; and the magnetism which Asolo was to exercise upon him, only fully asserted itself at a much later time.

A second letter to Miss Haworth is undated, but may have been written at any period of this or the ensuing year.

I have received, a couple of weeks since, a present — an album large and gaping, and as Cibber’s Richard says of the ‘fair Elizabeth’: ‘My heart is empty — she shall fill it’ — so say I (impudently?) of my grand trouble-table, which holds a sketch or two by my fine fellow Monclar, one lithograph — his own face of faces, — ’all the rest was amethyst.’ F. H. everywhere! not a soul beside ‘in the chrystal silence there,’ and it locks, this album; now, don’t shower drawings on M., who has so many advantages over me as it is: or at least don’t bid me of all others say what he is to have.

The ‘Master’ is somebody you don’t know, W. J. Fox, a magnificent and poetical nature, who used to write in reviews when I was a boy, and to whom my verses, a bookful, written at the ripe age of twelve and thirteen, were shown: which verses he praised not a little; which praise comforted me not a little. Then I lost sight of him for years and years; then I published anonymously a little poem — which he, to my inexpressible delight, praised and expounded in a gallant article in a magazine of which he was the editor; then I found him out again; he got a publisher for ‘Paracelsus’ (I read it to him in manuscript) and is in short ‘my literary father’. Pretty nearly the same thing did he for Miss Martineau, as she has said somewhere. God knows I forget what the ‘talk’, table-talk was about — I think she must have told you the results of the whole day we spent tete-a-tete at Ascot, and that day’s, the dinner-day’s morning at Elstree and St. Albans. She is to give me advice about my worldly concerns, and not before I need it!

I cannot say or sing the pleasure your way of writing gives me — do go on, and tell me all sorts of things, ‘the story’ for a beginning; but your moralisings on ‘your age’ and the rest, are — now what are they? not to be reasoned on, disputed, laughed at, grieved about: they are ‘Fanny’s crotchets’. I thank thee, Jew (lia), for teaching me that word.

I don’t know that I shall leave town for a month: my friend Monclar looks piteous when I talk of such an event. I can’t bear to leave him; he is to take my portrait to-day (a famous one he has taken!) and very like he engages it shall be. I am going to town for the purpose… .

Now, then, do something for me, and see if I’ll ask Miss M — — to help you! I am going to begin the finishing ‘Sordello’ — and to begin thinking a Tragedy (an Historical one, so I shall want heaps of criticisms on ‘Strafford’) and I want to have another tragedy in prospect, I write best so provided: I had chosen a splendid subject for it, when I learned that a magazine for next, this, month, will have a scene founded on my story; vulgarizing or doing no good to it: and I accordingly throw it up. I want a subject of the most wild and passionate love, to contrast with the one I mean to have ready in a short time. I have many half-conceptions, floating fancies: give me your notion of a thorough self-devotement, self-forgetting; should it be a woman who loves thus, or a man? What circumstances will best draw out, set forth this feeling? …

The tragedies in question were to be ‘King Victor and King Charles’, and ‘The Return of the Druses’.

This letter affords a curious insight into Mr. Browning’s mode of work; it is also very significant of the small place which love had hitherto occupied in his life. It was evident, from his appeal to Miss Haworth’s ‘notion’ on the subject, that he had as yet no experience, even imaginary, of a genuine passion, whether in woman or man. The experience was still distant from him in point of time. In circumstance he was nearer to it than he knew; for it was in 1839 that he became acquainted with Mr. Kenyon.

When dining one day at Serjeant Talfourd’s, he was accosted by a pleasant elderly man, who, having, we conclude, heard who he was, asked leave to address to him a few questions: ‘Was his father’s name Robert? had he gone to school at the Rev. Mr. Bell’s at Cheshunt, and was he still alive?’ On receiving affirmative answers, he went on to say that Mr. Browning and he had been great chums at school, and though they had lost sight of each other in after-life, he had never forgotten his old playmate, but even alluded to him in a little book which he had published a few years before. *

*The volume is entitled ‘Rhymed Plea for Tolerance’ (1833), and contains a reference to Mr. Kenyon’s schooldays, and to the classic fights which Mr. Browning had instituted.

The next morning the poet asked his father if he remembered a schoolfellow named John Kenyon. He replied, ‘Certainly! This is his face,’ and sketched a boy’s head, in which his son at once recognized that of the grown man. The acquaintance was renewed, and Mr. Kenyon proved ever afterwards a warm friend. Mr. Browning wrote of him, in a letter to Professor Knight of St. Andrews, Jan. 10, 1884: ‘He was one of the best of human beings, with a general sympathy for excellence of every kind. He enjoyed the friendship of Wordsworth, of Southey, of Landor, and, in later days, was intimate with most of my contemporaries of eminence.’ It was at Mr. Kenyon’s house that the poet saw most of Wordsworth, who always stayed there when he came to town.

In 1840 ‘Sordello’ appeared. It was, relatively to its length, by far the slowest in preparation of Mr. Browning’s poems. This seemed, indeed, a condition of its peculiar character. It had lain much deeper in the author’s mind than the various slighter works which were thrown off in the course of its inception. We know from the preface to ‘Strafford’ that it must have been begun soon after ‘Paracelsus’. Its plan may have belonged to a still earlier date; for it connects itself with ‘Pauline’ as the history of a poetic soul; with both the earlier poems, as the manifestation of the self-conscious spiritual ambitions which were involved in that history. This first imaginative mood was also outgrowing itself in the very act of self-expression; for the tragedies written before the conclusion of ‘Sordello’ impress us as the product of a different mental state — as the work of a more balanced imagination and a more mature mind.

It would be interesting to learn how Mr. Browning’s typical poet became embodied in this mediaeval form: whether the half-mythical character of the real Sordello presented him as a fitting subject for imaginative psychological treatment, or whether the circumstances among which he moved seemed the best adapted to the development of the intended type. The inspiration may have come through the study of Dante, and his testimony to the creative influence of Sordello on their mother-tongue. That period of Italian history must also have assumed, if it did not already possess, a great charm for Mr. Browning’s fancy, since he studied no less than thirty works upon it, which were to contribute little more to his dramatic picture than what he calls ‘decoration’, or ‘background’. But the one guide which he has given us to the reading of the poem is his assertion that its historical circumstance is only to be regarded as background; and the extent to which he identified himself with the figure of Sordello has been proved by his continued belief that its prominence was throughout maintained. He could still declare, so late as 1863, in his preface to the reprint of the work, that his ‘stress’ in writing it had lain ‘on the incidents in the development of a soul, little else’ being to his mind ‘worth study’. I cannot therefore help thinking that recent investigations of the life and character of the actual poet, however in themselves praiseworthy and interesting, have been often in some degree a mistake; because, directly or indirectly, they referred Mr. Browning’s Sordello to an historical reality, which his author had grasped, as far as was then possible, but to which he was never intended to conform.