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

One of our very few written reminiscences of Mr. Browning’s social life refers to this year, 1864, and to the evening, February 12, on which he signed his will in the presence of Mr. Francis Palgrave and Alfred Tennyson. It is inscribed in the diary of Mr. Thomas Richmond, then chaplain to St. George’s Hospital; and Mr. Reginald Palgrave has kindly procured me a copy of it. A brilliant party had met at dinner at the house of Mr. F. Palgrave, York Gate, Regent’s Park; Mr. Richmond, having fulfilled a prior engagement, had joined it later. ‘There were, in order,’ he says, ‘round the dinner-table (dinner being over), Gifford Palgrave, Tennyson, Dr. John Ogle, Sir Francis H. Doyle, Frank Palgrave, W. E. Gladstone, Browning, Sir John Simeon, Monsignor Patterson, Woolner, and Reginald Palgrave.’

Mr. Richmond closes his entry by saying he will never forget that evening. The names of those whom it had brought together, almost all to be sooner or later numbered among the Poet’s friends, were indeed enough to stamp it as worthy of recollection. One or two characteristic utterances of Mr. Browning are, however, the only ones which it seems advisable to repeat here. The conversation having turned on the celebration of the Shakespeare ter-centenary, he said: ‘Here we are called upon to acknowledge Shakespeare, we who have him in our very bones and blood, our very selves. The very recognition of Shakespeare’s merits by the Committee reminds me of nothing so apt as an illustration, as the decree of the Directoire that men might acknowledge God.’

Among the subjects discussed was the advisability of making schoolboys write English verses as well as Latin and Greek. ‘Woolner and Sir Francis Doyle were for this; Gladstone and Browning against it.’

Work had now found its fitting place in the Poet’s life. It was no longer the overflow of an irresistible productive energy; it was the deliberate direction of that energy towards an appointed end. We hear something of his own feeling concerning this in a letter of August ‘65, again from Ste.-Marie, and called forth by some gossip concerning him which Miss Blagden had connected with his then growing fame.

‘… I suppose that what you call “my fame within these four years” comes from a little of this gossiping and going about, and showing myself to be alive: and so indeed some folks say — but I hardly think it: for remember I was uninterruptedly (almost) in London from the time I published ‘Paracelsus’ till I ended that string of plays with ‘Luria’ — and I used to go out then, and see far more of merely literary people, critics &c. than I do now, — but what came of it? There were always a few people who had a certain opinion of my poems, but nobody cared to speak what he thought, or the things printed twenty-five years ago would not have waited so long for a good word; but at last a new set of men arrive who don’t mind the conventionalities of ignoring one and seeing everything in another — Chapman says, “the new orders come from Oxford and Cambridge,” and all my new cultivators are young men — more than that, I observe that some of my old friends don’t like at all the irruption of outsiders who rescue me from their sober and private approval, and take those words out of their mouths “which they always meant to say” and never did. When there gets to be a general feeling of this kind, that there must be something in the works of an author, the reviews are obliged to notice him, such notice as it is — but what poor work, even when doing its best! I mean poor in the failure to give a general notion of the whole works; not a particular one of such and such points therein. As I begun, so I shall end, — taking my own course, pleasing myself or aiming at doing so, and thereby, I hope, pleasing God.

‘As I never did otherwise, I never had any fear as to what I did going ultimately to the bad, — hence in collected editions I always reprinted everything, smallest and greatest. Do you ever see, by the way, the numbers of the selection which Moxons publish? They are exclusively poems omitted in that other selection by Forster; it seems little use sending them to you, but when they are completed, if they give me a few copies, you shall have one if you like. Just before I left London, Macmillan was anxious to print a third selection, for his Golden Treasury, which should of course be different from either — but three seem too absurd. There — enough of me —

‘I certainly will do my utmost to make the most of my poor self before I die; for one reason, that I may help old Pen the better; I was much struck by the kind ways, and interest shown in me by the Oxford undergraduates, — those introduced to me by Jowett. — I am sure they would be the more helpful to my son. So, good luck to my great venture, the murder-poem, which I do hope will strike you and all good lovers of mine… .’

We cannot wonder at the touch of bitterness with which Mr. Browning dwells on the long neglect which he had sustained; but it is at first sight difficult to reconcile this high positive estimate of the value of his poetry with the relative depreciation of his own poetic genius which constantly marks his attitude towards that of his wife. The facts are, however, quite compatible. He regarded Mrs. Browning’s genius as greater, because more spontaneous, than his own: owing less to life and its opportunities; but he judged his own work as the more important, because of the larger knowledge of life which had entered into its production. He was wrong in the first terms of his comparison: for he underrated the creative, hence spontaneous element in his own nature, while claiming primarily the position of an observant thinker; and he overrated the amount of creativeness implied by the poetry of his wife. He failed to see that, given her intellectual endowments, and the lyric gift, the characteristics of her genius were due to circumstances as much as those of his own. Actual life is not the only source of poetic inspiration, though it may perhaps be the best. Mrs. Browning as a poet became what she was, not in spite of her long seclusion, but by help of it. A touching paragraph, bearing upon this subject, is dated October ‘65.

‘… Another thing. I have just been making a selection of Ba’s poems which is wanted — how I have done it, I can hardly say — it is one dear delight to know that the work of her goes on more effectually than ever — her books are more and more read — certainly, sold. A new edition of Aurora Leigh is completely exhausted within this year… .’

Of the thing next dearest to his memory, his Florentine home, he had written in the January of this year:

‘… Yes, Florence will never be my Florence again. To build over or beside Poggio seems barbarous and inexcusable. The Fiesole side don’t matter. Are they going to pull the old walls down, or any part of them, I want to know? Why can’t they keep the old city as a nucleus and build round and round it, as many rings of houses as they please, — framing the picture as deeply as they please? Is Casa Guidi to be turned into any Public Office? I should think that its natural destination. If I am at liberty to flee away one day, it will not be to Florence, I dare say. As old Philipson said to me once of Jerusalem — ”No, I don’t want to go there, — I can see it in my head.” … Well, goodbye, dearest Isa. I have been for a few minutes — nay, a good many, — so really with you in Florence that it would be no wonder if you heard my steps up the lane to your house… .’

Part of a letter written in the September of ‘65 from Ste.-Marie may be interesting as referring to the legend of Pornic included in ‘Dramatis Personae’.

‘… I suppose my “poem” which you say brings me and Pornic together in your mind, is the one about the poor girl — if so, “fancy” (as I hear you say) they have pulled down the church since I arrived last month — there are only the shell-like, roofless walls left, for a few weeks more; it was very old — built on a natural base of rock — small enough, to be sure — so they build a smart new one behind it, and down goes this; just as if they could not have pitched down their brick and stucco farther away, and left the old place for the fishermen — so here — the church is even more picturesque — and certain old Norman ornaments, capitals of pillars and the like, which we left erect in the doorway, are at this moment in a heap of rubbish by the roadside. The people here are good, stupid and dirty, without a touch of the sense of picturesqueness in their clodpolls… .’