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

Looking back on the first appearance of his tragedy through the widening perspectives of nearly forty years, Mr. Browning might well declare as he did in the letter to Lady Martin to which I have just referred, that her ‘perfect behaviour as a woman’ and her ‘admirable playing as an actress’ had been (or at all events were) to him ‘the one gratifying circumstance connected with it.’

He also felt it a just cause of bitterness that the letter from Charles Dickens, *which conveyed his almost passionate admiration of ‘A Blot in the ‘Scutcheon’, and was clearly written to Mr. Forster in order that it might be seen, was withheld for thirty years from his knowledge, and that of the public whose judgment it might so largely have influenced. Nor was this the only time in the poet’s life that fairly earned honours escaped him.

*See Forster’s ‘Life of Dickens’.

‘Colombe’s Birthday’ was produced in 1853 at the Haymarket; *and afterwards in the provinces, under the direction of Miss Helen Faucit, who created the principal part. It was again performed for the Browning Society in 1885, **and although Miss Alma Murray, as Colombe, was almost entirely supported by amateurs, the result fully justified Miss Mary Robinson (now Madame James Darmesteter) in writing immediately afterwards in the Boston ‘Literary World’: ***

*Also in 1853 or 1854 at Boston.

**It had been played by amateurs, members of the Browning Society, and their friends, at the house of Mr. Joseph King, in January 1882.

***December 12, 1885; quoted in Mr. Arthur Symons’ ‘Introduction to the Study of Browning’.

‘“Colombe’s Birthday” is charming on the boards, clearer, more direct in action, more full of delicate surprises than one imagines it in print. With a very little cutting it could be made an excellent acting play.’

Mr. Gosse has seen a first edition copy of it marked for acting, and alludes in his ‘Personalia’ to the greatly increased knowledge of the stage which its minute directions displayed. They told also of sad experience in the sacrifice of the poet which the play-writer so often exacts: since they included the proviso that unless a very good Valence could be found, a certain speech of his should be left out. That speech is very important to the poetic, and not less to the moral, purpose of the play: the triumph of unworldly affections. It is that in which Valence defies the platitudes so often launched against rank and power, and shows that these may be very beautiful things — in which he pleads for his rival, and against his own heart. He is the better man of the two, and Colombe has fallen genuinely in love with him. But the instincts of sovereignty are not outgrown in one day however eventful, and the young duchess has shown herself amply endowed with them. The Prince’s offer promised much, and it held still more. The time may come when she will need that crowning memory of her husband’s unselfishness and truth, not to regret what she has done.

‘King Victor and King Charles’ and ‘The Return of the Druses’ are both admitted by competent judges to have good qualifications for the stage; and Mr. Browning would have preferred seeing one of these acted to witnessing the revival of ‘Strafford’ or ‘A Blot in the ‘Scutcheon’, from neither of which the best amateur performance could remove the stigma of past, real or reputed, failure; and when once a friend belonging to the Browning Society told him she had been seriously occupied with the possibility of producing the Eastern play, he assented to the idea with a simplicity that was almost touching, ‘It was written for the stage,’ he said, ‘and has only one scene.’ He knew, however, that the single scene was far from obviating all the difficulties of the case, and that the Society, with its limited means, did the best it could.

I seldom hear any allusion to a passage in ‘King Victor and King Charles’ which I think more than rivals the famous utterance of Valence, revealing as it does the same grasp of non-conventional truth, while its occasion lends itself to a far deeper recognition of the mystery, the frequent hopeless dilemma of our moral life. It is that in which Polixena, the wife of Charles, entreats him for duty’s sake to retain the crown, though he will earn, by so doing, neither the credit of a virtuous deed nor the sure, persistent consciousness of having performed one.

Four poems of the ‘Dramatic Lyrics’ had appeared, as I have said, in the ‘Monthly Repository’. Six of those included in the ‘Dramatic Lyrics and Romances’ were first published in ‘Hood’s Magazine’ from June 1844 to April 1845, a month before Hood’s death. These poems were, ‘The Laboratory’, ‘Claret and Tokay’, ‘Garden Fancies’, ‘The Boy and the Angel’, ‘The Tomb at St. Praxed’s’, and ‘The Flight of the Duchess’. Mr. Hood’s health had given way under stress of work, and Mr. Browning with other friends thus came forward to help him. The fact deserves remembering in connection with his subsequent unbroken rule never to write for magazines. He might always have made exceptions for friendly or philanthropic objects; the appearance of ‘Herve Riel’ in the ‘Cornhill Magazine’, 1870, indeed proves that it was so. But the offer of a blank cheque would not have tempted him, for his own sake, to this concession, as he would have deemed it, of his integrity of literary purpose.

‘In a Gondola’ grew out of a single verse extemporized for a picture by Maclise, in what circumstances we shall hear in the poet’s own words.

The first proof of ‘Artemis Prologuizes’ had the following note:

‘I had better say perhaps that the above is nearly all retained of a tragedy I composed, much against my endeavour, while in bed with a fever two years ago — it went farther into the story of Hippolytus and Aricia; but when I got well, putting only thus much down at once, I soon forgot the remainder.’ *

*When Mr. Browning gave me these supplementary details for the ‘Handbook’, he spoke as if his illness had interrupted the work, not preceded its conception. The real fact is, I think, the more striking.

Mr. Browning would have been very angry with himself if he had known he ever wrote ‘I had better’; and the punctuation of this note, as well as of every other unrevised specimen which we possess of his early writing, helps to show by what careful study of the literary art he must have acquired his subsequent mastery of it.

‘Cristina’ was addressed in fancy to the Spanish queen. It is to be regretted that the poem did not remain under its original heading of ‘Queen Worship’: as this gave a practical clue to the nature of the love described, and the special remoteness of its object.

‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’ and another poem were written in May 1842 for Mr. Macready’s little eldest son, Willy, who was confined to the house by illness, and who was to amuse himself by illustrating the poems as well as reading them; *and the first of these, though not intended for publication, was added to the ‘Dramatic Lyrics’, because some columns of that number of ‘Bells and Pomegranates’ still required filling. It is perhaps not known that the second was ‘Crescentius, the Pope’s Legate’: now included in ‘Asolando’.

*Miss Browning has lately found some of the illustrations, and the touching childish letter together with which her brother received them.

Mr. Browning’s father had himself begun a rhymed story on the subject of ‘The Pied Piper’; but left it unfinished when he discovered that his son was writing one. The fragment survives as part of a letter addressed to Mr. Thomas Powell, and which I have referred to as in the possession of Mr. Dykes Campbell.

‘The Lost Leader’ has given rise to periodical questionings continued until the present day, as to the person indicated in its title. Mr. Browning answered or anticipated them fifteen years ago in a letter to Miss Lee, of West Peckham, Maidstone. It was his reply to an application in verse made to him in their very young days by herself and two other members of her family, the manner of which seems to have unusually pleased him.