1863-1869

Pornic—’James Lee’s Wife’—Meeting at Mr. F. Palgrave’s—Letters to Miss Blagden—His own Estimate of his Work—His Father’s Illness and Death; Miss Browning—Le Croisic—Academic Honours; Letter to the Master of Balliol—Death of Miss Barrett—Audierne—Uniform Edition of his Works—His rising Fame—’Dramatis Personae’—’The Ring and the Book’; Character of Pompilia.

The most constant contributions to Mr. Browning’s history are supplied during the next eight or nine years by extracts from his letters to Miss Blagden. Our next will be dated from Ste.-Marie, near Pornic, where he and his family again spent their holiday in 1864 and 1865. Some idea of the life he led there is given at the close of a letter to Frederic Leighton, August 17, 1863, in which he says:

’I live upon milk and fruit, bathe daily, do a good morning’s work, read a little with Pen and somewhat more by myself, go to bed early, and get up earlyish—rather liking it all.’

This mention of a diet of milk and fruit recalls a favourite habit of Mr. Browning’s: that of almost renouncing animal food whenever he went abroad. It was partly promoted by the inferior quality of foreign meat, and showed no sign of specially agreeing with him, at all events in his later years, when he habitually returned to England looking thinner and more haggard than before he left it. But the change was always congenial to his taste.

A fuller picture of these simple, peaceful, and poetic Pornic days comes to us through Miss Blagden, August 18:

’. . . This is a wild little place in Brittany, something like that village where we stayed last year. Close to the sea—a hamlet of a dozen houses, perfectly lonely—one may walk on the edge of the low rocks by the sea for miles. Our house is the Mayor’s, large enough, clean and bare. If I could, I would stay just as I am for many a day. I feel out of the very earth sometimes as I sit here at the window; with the little church, a field, a few houses, and the sea. On a weekday there is nobody in the village, plenty of hay-stacks, cows and fowls; all our butter, eggs, milk, are produced in the farm-house. Such a soft sea, and such a mournful wind!

’I wrote a poem yesterday of 120 lines, and mean to keep writing whether I like it or not. . . .’

That ‘window’ was the ‘Doorway’ in ‘James Lee’s Wife’. The sea, the field, and the fig-tree were visible from it.

A long interval in the correspondence, at all events so far as we are concerned, carries us to the December of 1864, and then Mr. Browning wrote:

’. . . on the other hand, I feel such comfort and delight in doing the best I can with my own object of life, poetry—which, I think, I never could have seen the good of before, that it shows me I have taken the root I did take, well. I hope to do much more yet—and that the flower of it will be put into Her hand somehow. I really have great opportunities and advantages—on the whole, almost unprecedented ones—I think, no other disturbances and cares than those I am most grateful for being allowed to have. . . .’

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 road-side. The people here are good, stupid and dirty, without a touch of the sense of picturesqueness in their clodpolls. . . .’

The little record continues through 1866.

Fe, ’66.

’. . . I go out a great deal; but have enjoyed nothing so much as a dinner last week with Tennyson, who, with his wife and one son, is staying in town for a few weeks,—and she is just what she was and always will be—very sweet and dear: he seems to me better than ever. I met him at a large party on Saturday—also Carlyle, whom I never met at a “drum” before. . . . Pen is drawing our owl—a bird that is the light of our house, for his tameness and engaging ways. . . .’

May 19, ’66.

’. . . My father has been unwell,—he is better and will go into the country the moment the east winds allow,—for in Paris,—as here,—there is a razor wrapped up in the flannel of sunshine. I hope to hear presently from my sister, and will tell you if a letter comes: he is eighty-five, almost,—you see! otherwise his wonderful constitution would keep me from inordinate apprehension. His mind is absolutely as I always remember it,—and the other day when I wanted some information about a point of mediaeval history, he wrote a regular bookful of notes and extracts thereabout. . . .’

June 20, ’66.

’My dearest Isa, I was telegraphed for to Paris last week, and arrived time enough to pass twenty-four hours more with my father: he died on the 14th—quite exhausted by internal haemorrhage, which would have overcome a man of thirty. He retained all his faculties to the last—was utterly indifferent to death,—asking with surprise what it was we were affected about since he was perfectly happy?—and kept his own strange sweetness of soul to the end—nearly his last words to me, as I was fanning him, were “I am so afraid that I fatigue you, dear!” this, while his sufferings were great; for the strength of his constitution seemed impossible to be subdued. He wanted three weeks exactly to complete his eighty-fifth year. So passed away this good, unworldly, kind-hearted, religious man, whose powers natural and acquired would so easily have made him a notable man, had he known what vanity or ambition or the love of money or social influence meant. As it is, he was known by half-a-dozen friends. He was worthy of being Ba’s father—out of the whole world, only he, so far as my experience goes. She loved him,—and he said, very recently, while gazing at her portrait, that only that picture had put into his head that there might be such a thing as the worship of the images of saints. My sister will come and live with me henceforth. You see what she loses. All her life has been spent in caring for my mother, and seventeen years after that, my father. You may be sure she does not rave and rend hair like people who have plenty to atone for in the past; but she loses very much. I returned to London last night. . . .’

During his hurried journey to Paris, Mr. Browning was mentally blessing the Emperor for having abolished the system of passports, and thus enabled him to reach his father’s bedside in time. His early Italian journeys had brought him some vexatious experience of the old order of things. Once, at Venice, he had been mistaken for a well-known Liberal, Dr. Bowring, and found it almost impossible to get his passport ‘vise’; and, on another occasion, it aroused suspicion by being ‘too good’; though in what sense I do not quite remember.

Miss Browning did come to live with her brother, and was thenceforward his inseparable companion. Her presence with him must therefore be understood wherever I have had no special reason for mentioning it.

They tried Dinard for the remainder of the summer; but finding it unsuitable, proceeded by St.-Malo to Le Croisic, the little sea-side town of south-eastern Brittany which two of Mr. Browning’s poems have since rendered famous.

The following extract has no date.

Le Croisic, Loire Inférieure.

’. . . We all found Dinard unsuitable, and after staying a few days at St. Malo resolved to try this place, and well for us, since it serves our purpose capitally. . . . We are in the most delicious and peculiar old house I ever occupied, the oldest in the town—plenty of great rooms—nearly as much space as in Villa Alberti. The little town, and surrounding country are wild and primitive, even a trifle beyond Pornic perhaps. Close by is Batz, a village where the men dress in white from head to foot, with baggy breeches, and great black flap hats;—opposite is Guerande, the old capital of Bretagne: you have read about it in Balzac’s ’Béatrix’,—and other interesting places are near. The sea is all round our peninsula, and on the whole I expect we shall like it very much. . . .’

Later.

’. . . We enjoyed Croisic increasingly to the last—spite of three weeks’ vile weather, in striking contrast to the golden months at Pornic last year. I often went to Guerande—once Sarianna and I walked from it in two hours and something under,—nine miles:—though from our house, straight over the sands and sea, it is not half the distance. . . .’

In 1867 Mr. Browning received his first and greatest academic honours. The M.A. degree by diploma, of the University of Oxford, was conferred on him in June; and in the month of October he was made honorary Fellow of Balliol College. Dr. Jowett allows me to publish the, as he terms it, very characteristic letter in which he acknowledged the distinction. Dr. Scott, afterwards Dean of Rochester, was then Master of Balliol.

’Not a lower degree than that of D.C.L., but a much higher honour, hardly given since Dr. Johnson’s time except to kings and royal personages. . . .’ So the Keeper of the Archives wrote to Mr. Browning at the time.

19, Warwick Crescent: Oc, ’67.

Dear Dr. Scott,—I am altogether unable to say how I feel as to the fact you communicate to me. I must know more intimately than you can how little worthy I am of such an honour,—you hardly can set the value of that honour, you who give, as I who take it.

Indeed, there are both ‘duties and emoluments’ attached to this position,—duties of deep and lasting gratitude, and emoluments through which I shall be wealthy my life long. I have at least loved learning and the learned, and there needed no recognition of my love on their part to warrant my professing myself, as I do, dear Dr. Scott, yours ever most faithfully, Robert Browning.

In the following year he received and declined the virtual offer of the Lord Rectorship of the University of St. Andrews, rendered vacant by the death of Mr. J. S. Mill.

He returned with his sister to Le Croisic for the summer of 1867.

In June 1868, Miss Arabel Barrett died, of a rheumatic affection of the heart. As did her sister seven years before, she passed away in Mr. Browning’s arms. He wrote the event to Miss Blagden as soon as it occurred, describing also a curious circumstance attendant on it.

19th June, ’68.

’. . . You know I am not superstitious—here is a note I made in a book, Tuesday, July 21, 1863. “Arabel told me yesterday that she had been much agitated by a dream which happened the night before, Sunday, July 19. She saw Her and asked ‘when shall I be with you?’ the reply was, ‘Dearest, in five years,’ whereupon Arabella woke. She knew in her dream that it was not to the living she spoke.”—In five years, within a month of their completion—I had forgotten the date of the dream, and supposed it was only three years ago, and that two had still to run. Only a coincidence, but noticeable. . . .’

In August he writes again from Audierne, Finisterre (Brittany).

’. . . You never heard of this place, I daresay. After staying a few days at Paris we started for Rennes,—reached Caen and halted a little—thence made for Auray, where we made excursions to Carnac, Lokmariaker, and Ste.-Anne d’Auray; all very interesting of their kind; then saw Brest, Morlaix, St.-Pol de Leon, and the sea-port Roscoff,—our intended bathing place—it was full of folk, however, and otherwise impracticable, so we had nothing for it, but to “rebrousser chemin” and get to the south-west again. At Quimper we heard (for a second time) that Audierne would suit us exactly, and to it we came—happily, for “suit” it certainly does. Look on the map for the most westerly point of Bretagne—and of the mainland of Europe—there is niched Audierne, a delightful quite unspoiled little fishing-town, with the open ocean in front, and beautiful woods, hills and dales, meadows and lanes behind and around,—sprinkled here and there with villages each with its fine old Church. Sarianna and I have just returned from a four hours’ walk in the course of which we visited a town, Pont Croix, with a beautiful cathedral-like building amid the cluster of clean bright Breton houses,—and a little farther is another church, “Notre Dame de Comfort”, with only a hovel or two round it, worth the journey from England to see; we are therefore very well off—at an inn, I should say, with singularly good, kind, and liberal people, so have no cares for the moment. May you be doing as well! The weather has been most propitious, and to-day is perfect to a wish. We bathe, but somewhat ingloriously, in a smooth creek of mill-pond quietude, (there being no cabins on the bay itself,) unlike the great rushing waves of Croisic—the water is much colder. . . .’

The tribute contained in this letter to the merits of lé Pere Batifoulier and his wife would not, I think, be endorsed by the few other English travellers who have stayed at their inn. The writer’s own genial and kindly spirit no doubt partly elicited, and still more supplied, the qualities he saw in them.

The six-volume, so long known as ‘uniform’ edition of Mr. Browning’s works, was brought out in the autumn of this year by Messrs. Smith, Elder & Co.; practically Mr. George Murray Smith, who was to be thenceforward his exclusive publisher and increasingly valued friend. In the winter months appeared the first two volumes (to be followed in the ensuing spring by the third and fourth) of ‘The Ring and the Book’.

With ‘The Ring and the Book’ Mr. Browning attained the full recognition of his genius. The ‘Athenaeum’ spoke of it as the ‘opus magnum’ of the generation; not merely beyond all parallel the supremest poetic achievement of the time, but the most precious and profound spiritual treasure that England had produced since the days of Shakespeare. His popularity was yet to come, so also the widespread reading of his hitherto neglected poems; but henceforth whatever he published was sure of ready acceptance, of just, if not always enthusiastic, appreciation. The ground had not been gained at a single leap. A passage in another letter to Miss Blagden shows that, when ‘The Ring and the Book’ appeared, a high place was already awaiting it outside those higher academic circles in which its author’s position was secured.

’. . . I want to get done with my poem. Booksellers are making me pretty offers for it. One sent to propose, last week, to publish it at his risk, giving me all the profits, and pay me the whole in advance—“for the incidental advantages of my name”—the R. B. who for six months once did not sell one copy of the poems! I ask 200 Pounds for the sheets to America, and shall get it. . . .’

His presence in England had doubtless stimulated the public interest in his productions; and we may fairly credit ‘Dramatis Personae’ with having finally awakened his countrymen of all classes to the fact that a great creative power had arisen among them. ‘The Ring and the Book’ and ‘Dramatis Personae’ cannot indeed be dissociated in what was the culminating moment in the author’s poetic life, even more than the zenith of his literary career. In their expression of all that constituted the wide range and the characteristic quality of his genius, they at once support and supplement each other. But a fact of more distinctive biographical interest connects itself exclusively with the later work.

We cannot read the emotional passages of ‘The Ring and the Book’ without hearing in them a voice which is not Mr. Browning’s own: an echo, not of his past, but from it. The remembrance of that past must have accompanied him through every stage of the great work. Its subject had come to him in the last days of his greatest happiness. It had lived with him, though in the background of consciousness, through those of his keenest sorrow. It was his refuge in that aftertime, in which a subsiding grief often leaves a deeper sense of isolation. He knew the joy with which his wife would have witnessed the diligent performance of this his self-imposed task. The beautiful dedication contained in the first and last books was only a matter of course. But Mrs. Browning’s spiritual presence on this occasion was more than a presiding memory of the heart. I am convinced that it entered largely into the conception of ‘Pompilia’, and, so far as this depended on it, the character of the whole work. In the outward course of her history, Mr. Browning proceeded strictly on the ground of fact. His dramatic conscience would not have allowed it otherwise. He had read the record of the case, as he has been heard to say, fully eight times over before converting it into the substance of his poem; and the form in which he finally cast it, was that which recommended itself to him as true—which, within certain limits, was true. The testimony of those who watched by Pompilia’s death-bed is almost conclusive as to the absence of any criminal motive to her flight, or criminal circumstance connected with it. Its time proved itself to have been that of her impending, perhaps newly expected motherhood, and may have had some reference to this fact. But the real Pompilia was a simple child, who lived in bodily terror of her husband, and had made repeated efforts to escape from him. Unless my memory much deceives me, her physical condition plays no part in the historical defence of her flight. If it appeared there at all, it was as a merely practical incentive to her striving to place herself in safety. The sudden rapturous sense of maternity which, in the poetic rendering of the case, becomes her impulse to self-protection, was beyond her age and her culture; it was not suggested by the facts; and, what is more striking, it was not a natural development of Mr. Browning’s imagination concerning them.

The parental instinct was among the weakest in his nature—a fact which renders the more conspicuous his devotion to his own son; it finds little or no expression in his work. The apotheosis of motherhood which he puts forth through the aged priest in ‘Ivan Ivanovitch’ was due to the poetic necessity of lifting a ghastly human punishment into the sphere of Divine retribution. Even in the advancing years which soften the father into the grandfather, the essential quality of early childhood was not that which appealed to him. He would admire its flower-like beauty, but not linger over it. He had no special emotion for its helplessness. When he was attracted by a child it was through the evidence of something not only distinct from, but opposed to this. ‘It is the soul’ (I see) ‘in that speck of a body,’ he said, not many years ago, of a tiny boy—now too big for it to be desirable that I should mention his name, but whose mother, if she reads this, will know to whom I allude—who had delighted him by an act of intelligent grace which seemed beyond his years. The ingenuously unbounded maternal pride, the almost luscious maternal sentiment, of Pompilia’s dying moments can only associate themselves in our mind with Mrs. Browning’s personal utterances, and some notable passages in ‘Casa Guidi Windows’ and ‘Aurora Leigh’. Even the exalted fervour of the invocation to Caponsacchi, its blending of spiritual ecstasy with half-realized earthly emotion, has, I think, no parallel in her husband’s work.

‘Pompilia’ bears, still, unmistakably, the stamp of her author’s genius. Only he could have imagined her peculiar form of consciousness; her childlike, wondering, yet subtle, perception of the anomalies of life. He has raised the woman in her from the typical to the individual by this distinguishing touch of his supreme originality; and thus infused into her character a haunting pathos which renders it to many readers the most exquisite in the whole range of his creations. For others at the same time, it fails in the impressiveness because it lacks the reality which habitually marks them.

So much, however, is certain: Mr. Browning would never have accepted this ‘murder story’ as the subject of a poem, if he could not in some sense have made it poetical. It was only in an idealized Pompilia that the material for such a process could be found. We owe it, therefore, to the one departure from his usual mode of dramatic conception, that the Poet’s masterpiece has been produced. I know no other instance of what can be even mistaken for reflected inspiration in the whole range of his work, the given passages in ‘Pauline’ excepted.

The postscript of a letter to Frederic Leighton written so far back as October 17, 1864, is interesting in its connection with the preliminary stages of this great undertaking.

’A favour, if you have time for it. Go into the church St. Lorenzo in Lucina in the Corso—and look attentively at it—so as to describe it to me on your return. The general arrangement of the building, if with a nave—pillars or not—the number of altars, and any particularity there may be—over the High Altar is a famous Crucifixion by Guido. It will be of great use to me. I don’t care about the outsid.’