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

Villers-sur-mer, Calvados, France: September 7, ‘75.

Dear Friends, — Your letter has made a round to reach me — hence the delay in replying to it — which you will therefore pardon. I have been asked the question you put to me — tho’ never asked so poetically and so pleasantly — I suppose a score of times: and I can only answer, with something of shame and contrition, that I undoubtedly had Wordsworth in my mind — but simply as ‘a model’; you know, an artist takes one or two striking traits in the features of his ‘model’, and uses them to start his fancy on a flight which may end far enough from the good man or woman who happens to be ‘sitting’ for nose and eye.

I thought of the great Poet’s abandonment of liberalism, at an unlucky juncture, and no repaying consequence that I could ever see. But — once call my fancy-portrait ‘Wordsworth’ — and how much more ought one to say, — how much more would not I have attempted to say!

There is my apology, dear friends, and your acceptance of it will confirm me Truly yours, Robert Browning.

Some fragments of correspondence, not all very interesting, and his own allusion to an attack of illness, are our only record of the poet’s general life during the interval which separated the publication of ‘Pippa Passes’ from his second Italian journey.

An undated letter to Miss Haworth probably refers to the close of 1841.

‘… I am getting to love painting as I did once. Do you know I was a young wonder (as are eleven out of the dozen of us) at drawing? My father had faith in me, and over yonder in a drawer of mine lies, I well know, a certain cottage and rocks in lead pencil and black currant jam-juice (paint being rank poison, as they said when I sucked my brushes) with his (my father’s) note in one corner, “R. B., aetat. two years three months.” “How fast, alas, our days we spend — How vain they be, how soon they end!” I am going to print “Victor”, however, by February, and there is one thing not so badly painted in there — oh, let me tell you. I chanced to call on Forster the other day, and he pressed me into committing verse on the instant, not the minute, in Maclise’s behalf, who has wrought a divine Venetian work, it seems, for the British Institution. Forster described it well — but I could do nothing better, than this wooden ware — (all the “properties”, as we say, were given, and the problem was how to catalogue them in rhyme and unreason).

I send my heart up to thee, all my heart

In this my singing!

For the stars help me, and the sea bears part;

The very night is clinging

Closer to Venice’ streets to leave me space

Above me, whence thy face

May light my joyous heart to thee its dwelling-place.

Singing and stars and night and Venice streets and joyous heart, are properties, do you please to see. And now tell me, is this below the average of catalogue original poetry? Tell me — for to that end of being told, I write… . I dined with dear Carlyle and his wife (catch me calling people “dear” in a hurry, except in letter-beginnings!) yesterday. I don’t know any people like them. There was a son of Burns there, Major Burns whom Macready knows — he sung “Of all the airts”, “John Anderson”, and another song of his father’s… .’

In the course of 1842 he wrote the following note to Miss Flower, evidently relating to the publication of her ‘Hymns and Anthems’.

New Cross, Hatcham, Surrey: Tuesday morning.

Dear Miss Flower, — I am sorry for what must grieve Mr. Fox; for myself, I beg him earnestly not to see me till his entire convenience, however pleased I shall be to receive the letter you promise on his part.

And how can I thank you enough for this good news — all this music I shall be so thoroughly gratified to hear? Ever yours faithfully, Robert Browning.

His last letter to her was written in 1845; the subject being a concert of her own sacred music which she was about to give; and again, although more slightly, I anticipate the course of events, in order to give it in its natural connection with the present one. Mr. Browning was now engaged to be married, and the last ring of youthful levity had disappeared from his tone; but neither the new happiness nor the new responsibility had weakened his interest in his boyhood’s friend. Miss Flower must then have been slowly dying, and the closing words of the letter have the solemnity of a last farewell.

Sunday.

Dear Miss Flower, — I was very foolishly surprized at the sorrowful finical notice you mention: foolishly; for, God help us, how else is it with all critics of everything — don’t I hear them talk and see them write? I daresay he admires you as he said.

For me, I never had another feeling than entire admiration for your music — entire admiration — I put it apart from all other English music I know, and fully believe in it as the music we all waited for.

Of your health I shall not trust myself to speak: you must know what is unspoken. I should have been most happy to see you if but for a minute — and if next Wednesday, I might take your hand for a moment. —

But you would concede that, if it were right, remembering what is now very old friendship. May God bless you for ever (The signature has been cut off.)

In the autumn of 1844 Mr. Browning set forth for Italy, taking ship, it is believed, direct to Naples. Here he made the acquaintance of a young Neapolitan gentleman who had spent most of his life in Paris; and they became such good friends that they proceeded to Rome together. Mr. Scotti was an invaluable travelling companion, for he engaged their conveyance, and did all such bargaining in their joint interest as the habits of his country required. ‘As I write,’ Mr. Browning said in a letter to his sister, ‘I hear him disputing our bill in the next room. He does not see why we should pay for six wax candles when we have used only two.’ At Rome they spent most of their evenings with an old acquaintance of Mr. Browning’s, then Countess Carducci, and she pronounced Mr. Scotti the handsomest man she had ever seen. He certainly bore no appearance of being the least prosperous. But he blew out his brains soon after he and his new friend had parted; and I do not think the act was ever fully accounted for.

It must have been on his return journey that Mr. Browning went to Leghorn to see Edward John Trelawney, to whom he carried a letter of introduction. He described the interview long afterwards to Mr. Val Prinsep, but chiefly in his impressions of the cool courage which Mr. Trelawney had displayed during its course. A surgeon was occupied all the time in probing his leg for a bullet which had been lodged there some years before, and had lately made itself felt; and he showed himself absolutely indifferent to the pain of the operation. Mr. Browning’s main object in paying the visit had been, naturally, to speak with one who had known Byron and been the last to see Shelley alive; but we only hear of the two poets that they formed in part the subject of their conversation. He reached England, again, we suppose, through Germany — since he avoided Paris as before.

It has been asserted by persons otherwise well informed, that on this, if not on his previous Italian journey, Mr. Browning became acquainted with Stendhal, then French Consul at Civita Vecchia, and that he imbibed from the great novelist a taste for curiosities of Italian family history, which ultimately led him in the direction of the Franceschini case. It is certain that he profoundly admired this writer, and if he was not, at some time or other, introduced to him it was because the opportunity did not occur. But there is abundant evidence that no introduction took place, and quite sufficient proof that none was possible. Stendhal died in Paris in March 1842; and granting that he was at Civita Vecchia when the poet made his earlier voyage — no certainty even while he held the appointment — the ship cannot have touched there on its way to Trieste. It is also a mistake to suppose that Mr. Browning was specially interested in ancient chronicles, as such. This was one of the points on which he distinctly differed from his father. He took his dramatic subjects wherever he found them, and any historical research which they ultimately involved was undertaken for purposes of verification. ‘Sordello’ alone may have been conceived on a rather different plan, and I have no authority whatever for admitting that it was so. The discovery of the record of the Franceschini case was, as its author has everywhere declared, an accident.