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

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‘My sister was anxious to know exactly where the body was found: “Vouz savez la croix au sommet de la colline? A cette distance de cela!” That is precisely where I was standing when the thought came over me.’

A passage in a subsequent letter of September 3 clearly refers to some comment of Mrs. FitzGerald’s on the peculiar nature of this presentiment:

‘No — I attribute no sort of supernaturalism to my fancy about the thing that was really about to take place. By a law of the association of ideas — contraries come into the mind as often as similarities — and the peace and solitude readily called up the notion of what would most jar with them. I have often thought of the trouble that might have befallen me if poor Miss Smith’s death had happened the night before, when we were on the mountain alone together — or next morning when we were on the proposed excursion — only then we should have had companions.’

The letter then passes to other subjects.

‘This is the fifth magnificent day — like magnificence, unfit for turning to much account — for we cannot walk till sunset. I had two hours’ walk, or nearly, before breakfast, however: It is the loveliest country I ever had experience of, and we shall prolong our stay perhaps — apart from the concern for poor Cholmondeley and his friends, I should be glad to apprehend no long journey — besides the annoyance of having to pass Florence and Rome unvisited, for S.’s sake, I mean: even Naples would have been with its wonderful environs a tantalizing impracticability.

‘Your “Academy” came and was welcomed. The newspaper is like an electric eel, as one touches it and expects a shock. I am very anxious about the Archbishop who has always been strangely kind to me.’

He and his sister had accepted an invitation to spend the month of October with Mr. Cholmondeley at his villa in Ischia; but the party assembled there was broken up by the death of one of Mr. Cholmondeley’s guests, a young lady who had imprudently attempted the ascent of a dangerous mountain without a guide, and who lost her life in the experiment.

A short extract from a letter to Mrs. Charles Skirrow will show that even in this complete seclusion Mr. Browning’s patriotism did not go to sleep. There had been already sufficient evidence that his friendship did not; but it was not in the nature of his mental activities that they should be largely absorbed by politics, though he followed the course of his country’s history as a necessary part of his own life. It needed a crisis like that of our Egyptian campaign, or the subsequent Irish struggle, to arouse him to a full emotional participation in current events. How deeply he could be thus aroused remained yet to be seen.

‘If the George Smiths are still with you, give them my love, and tell them we shall expect to see them at Venice, — which was not so likely to be the case when we were bound for Ischia. As for Lady Wolseley — one dares not pretend to vie with her in anxiety just now; but my own pulses beat pretty strongly when I open the day’s newspaper — which, by some new arrangement, reaches us, oftener than not, on the day after publication. Where is your Bertie? I had an impassioned letter, a fortnight ago, from a nephew of mine, who is in the second division [battalion?] of the Black Watch; he was ordered to Edinburgh, and the regiment not dispatched, after all, — it having just returned from India; the poor fellow wrote in his despair “to know if I could do anything!” He may be wanted yet: though nothing seems wanted in Egypt, so capital appears to be the management.’

In 1879 Mr. Browning published the first series of his ‘Dramatic Idyls’; and their appearance sent a thrill of surprised admiration through the public mind. In ‘La Saisiaz’ and the accompanying poems he had accomplished what was virtually a life’s work. For he was approaching the appointed limit of man’s existence; and the poetic, which had been nourished in him by the natural life — which had once outstripped its developments, but on the whole remained subject to them — had therefore, also, passed through the successive phases of individual growth. He had been inspired as dramatic poet by the one avowed conviction that little else is worth study but the history of a soul; and outward act or circumstance had only entered into his creations as condition or incident of the given psychological state. His dramatic imagination had first, however unconsciously, sought its materials in himself; then gradually been projected into the world of men and women, which his widening knowledge laid open to him; it is scarcely necessary to say that its power was only fully revealed when it left the remote regions of poetical and metaphysical self-consciousness, to invoke the not less mysterious and far more searching utterance of the general human heart. It was a matter of course that in this expression of his dramatic genius, the intellectual and emotional should exhibit the varying relations which are developed by the natural life: that feeling should begin by doing the work of thought, as in ‘Saul’, and thought end by doing the work of feeling, as in ‘Fifine at the Fair’; and that the two should alternate or combine in proportioned intensity in such works of an intermediate period as ‘Cleon’, ‘A Death in the Desert’, the ‘Epistle of Karshish’, and ‘James Lee’s Wife’; the sophistical ingenuities of ‘Bishop Blougram’, and ‘Sludge’; and the sad, appealing tenderness of ‘Andrea del Sarto’ and ‘The Worst of It’.

It was also almost inevitable that so vigorous a genius should sometimes falsify calculations based on the normal life. The long-continued force and freshness of Mr. Browning’s general faculties was in itself a protest against them. We saw without surprise that during the decade which produced ‘Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau’, ‘Fifine at the Fair’, and ‘Red Cotton Nightcap Country’, he could give us ‘The Inn Album’, with its expression of the higher sexual love unsurpassed, rarely equalled, in the whole range of his work: or those two unique creations of airy fancy and passionate symbolic romance, ‘Saint Martin’s Summer’, and ‘Numpholeptos’. It was no ground for astonishment that the creative power in him should even ignore the usual period of decline, and defy, so far as is humanly possible, its natural laws of modification. But in the ‘Dramatic Idyls’ he did more than proceed with unflagging powers on a long-trodden, distinctive course; he took a new departure.

Mr. Browning did not forsake the drama of motive when he imagined and worked out his new group of poems; he presented it in a no less subtle and complex form. But he gave it the added force of picturesque realization; and this by means of incidents both powerful in themselves, and especially suited for its development. It was only in proportion to this higher suggestiveness that a startling situation ever seemed to him fit subject for poetry. Where its interest and excitement exhausted themselves in the external facts, it became, he thought, the property of the chronicler, but supplied no material for the poet; and he often declined matter which had been offered him for dramatic treatment because it belonged to the more sensational category.

It is part of the vital quality of the ‘Dramatic Idyls’ that, in them, the act and the motive are not yet finally identified with each other. We see the act still palpitating with the motive; the motive dimly striving to recognize or disclaim itself in the act. It is in this that the psychological poet stands more than ever strongly revealed. Such at least is the case in ‘Martin Relph’, and the idealized Russian legend, ‘Ivan Ivanovitch’. The grotesque tragedy of ‘Ned Bratts’ has also its marked psychological aspects, but they are of a simpler and broader kind.