Browning, poet and man; a survey

Front matter

CORNELL

UNIVERSITY

LIBRARY

Author's Preface

IM calling this book a "survey" I have meant to indicate the absence of any attempt at throwing new light upon Browning's already strongly illuminated work. I have used the word in its literal sense to express my intention of merely "looking over " the ground covered by his life and poetry, and the place the two seem to have occupied in the generation to which he belonged.

1 have laid more stress upon criticisms by other than upon my personal views, holding, with the Rev. IVlr. Ingham, that where "so much has been said, and that so well said," 1 could add little of value; but in sifting the mass of critical material that has gathered about Browning's poetry, 1 have, of course, been influenced by my own impression of him as well as by the authority of the critic.

When the adequate biography appears, it should be a very interesting book, answering a demand to which mine is not directed ; but if I strengthen in any degree the feeling that Browning's poetry is to be read like that of other poets, not as a task but for

the reader's pleasure, I shall be content.

E. L. C.

Contents

I. — Ancestry and Youth . . . . i II.— Pauline, Paracelsus, and Sordello . 17

III. — The Dramas .40

IV. — Elizabeth Barrett .... 64

Chapter I. Ancestry And Youth

UNLIKE Byron, Shelley, and Wordsworth, and like Keats, Browning is connected by his ancestry with what are called the 'lower classes of society. The earliest ancestor found for him through Dr. Furnivall's researches is Robert Browning I., born before 1700, and " ultimately head butler to Sir John Bankes, of Corfu Castle," in Dorsetshire. Interesting as it might be to emphasise this lineage in order to honour an obscure calling, it must be remembered that in 1700 the old ideals of domestic service had not entirely died out ; the notion of degradation in connection with it coming in with the Revolution of 1688.^ Before that time are numerous examples of servants of good family who were related to their employers.* Nothing seems to be known of Robert Browning I., save that he was

' See Notes and Queries, 6th S. , I V. , August 6, '8 1 , page 1 1 1 .

' In the Parish of Wedmore County, Somerset, is the record of the death on 1 1 April, 1517, of "Anna Browninge Cognata et famula Richardi Browninge," probably no connection of the eighteenth-century Browning, but not necessarily of better birth. {Notes and Queries.)

buried in woollen, a fact recorded in the Pentridge Registers and reminiscent of the old "Act for Burying in Woollen onely," framed "for the Encouragement of the Woolen Manufactures of the Kingdome, " His son Thomas was an innkeeper, holding the lease of Woodyates Inn, on the London, Dorchester, and Exeter Road. Following Thomas came four Roberts in direct succession, including the poet's son. The line of Roberts has, in fact, been unbroken through the six generations, Thomas having had a brother Robert who died in childhood.

The poet's grandfather was a clerk in the Bank of England for over fifty years. Browning describes him as " an old gentleman with his gouty leg tucked up on a chair, much more anxious that his grandson should n't get near his toe, than delighted to see the budding author. " In 1778 he married Margaret Tittle, a Creole born in the West Indies. The word "Creole," as applied in the West Indies, is defined as now meaning " any person, animal, or thing, born or grown in a hot Western colony, "the birthplace of the parents being no longer of any importance, and no distinction being made between white and black blood.' Dr. Furnivall emphasises the possibility, to him "the certainty," that Browning's grandmother had dark blood in her, and suggests that this may have had something to do with Mr. Barrett's unjustifiable aversion to his daughter's marriage, he being himself a West Indian estate-owner. In view of

' See Dr. Furnivall's essay on Browning's ancestry.

anceetr^ anb l^outb. 3

Mr. Barrett's uniform attitude on the subject of marriage for his children (as fully explained in Mr. Kenyon's Letters of Mrs. Browning), the suggestion can hardly be accepted.

Browning's father was also a bank clerk, serving nearly as long as the grandfather, but not attaining to so high a post. He had scholarly tastes, and a variety of accomplishments, chief among them an ability to draw in a spirited fashion with very suggestive treatment of line, as the recently published caricatures by him fully testify. His grandson, Mr. Robert Barrett Browning, says that he used to draw in the evening "for the amusement of friends and young people, of whom he was particularly fond." He drew very rapidly, and kept it up, purely as an amusement, to the end of his life. He used for his materials whatever came in his way, " old pencil-ends and scraps of paper — even pebbles on the seashore." His grandson adds that he "never pretended to be an artist, although he knew all the bones and muscles of the human body, their form as well as their names, by heart," and was "fond of drawing skeletons and skulls."' From some reminiscences by his brother Reuben we get an idea of his bookishness, which was not at all of the dryasdust character. " The love of reading attached him by sympathy to books," his brother writes; "old books were his delight, and, by his continual search

' See article on " Robert Browning, the Elder, as a Caricaturist," by F. G. Kitton; The Art Journal.

after them, he not only knew all the old bookstalls in London, but their contents, and if any scarce work were spoken of, he could tell forthwith where a copy of it could be had — nay, he would even describe in what part of the shop it was placed, and the price likely to be asked for it. Thus his own library became his treasure. His books, however, were confessedly not remarkable for costly binding, but for their rarity or for some interesting remarks he had to make on most of them ; and his memory was so good that not unfrequently, when a conversation at his table had reference to any particular subject, has he quietly left the room, and in the dark, from a thousand volumes in his library, brought two or three illustrative of the point under discussion."'

It has also been said of him that his detective faculty amounted to genius, and another story which, though not very significant, seems to be valued by his chroniclers, affirms that he always walked to and from the bank, and during his long service was only once late ; that being on the morning of the execution of Mr. and Mrs. Manning, when he could not get through the crowd in the Borough Road.

In the poem " Development" is a picture, that cannot be improved upon, of the relations between father and son during the first impressionable years of the poet's life :

My Father was a scholar and knew Greek. When I was five years old, I asked him once

' See The Art Journal, February, 1896.

ancestry ant) l^outb. 5

" What do you read about ? "

"The siege of Troy."

"What is a siege and what is Troy ? "

Whereat He piled up chairs and tables for a town, Set me a-top for Priam, called our cat

— Helen, enticed away from home (he said)

By wicked Paris, who couched somewhere close

Under the footstool, being cowardly.

But whom — since she was worth the pains, poor puss —

Towzer and Tray, — our dogs^ the Atreidai, — sought

By taking Troy to get possession of

— Always when great Achilles ceased to sulk, (My pony in the stable) — forth would prance And put to flight Hector — our page-boy's self. This taught me who was who and what was what; So far I rightly understood the case

At five years old : a huge delight it proved And still proves — thanks to that instructor sage My Father, who knew better than turn straight Learning's full glare on weak-eyed ignorance, Or, worse yet, leave weak eyes to grow sand-blind. Content with darkness and vacuity.

Mr. Frederick Locker in a letter to Browning after his father's death, begged him to draw up a slight sketch that should introduce to the world that interesting personality. "Perhaps he was shy," Mr. Locker wrote : " at any rate he was much less known than he ought to have been ; and now, perhaps, he only remains in the recollection of his family and of one or two superior people (like myself !) who were capable of appreciating him." ^

All this makes it easy to trace Browning's inheritance of genial temperament, love for books, keen

' See Mrs. Orr's Life and Letters of Robert Browning.

intuitions, imaginative ardour, and so on ; and gives credibility to his own grateful acknowledgment of his father's influence : "He secured for me all the ease and comfort that a literary man needs to do good work," he said. "It would have been shameful if 1 had not done my best to realise his expectations of me." It is also true, however, that Browning senior possessed some traits not so desirable to transmit. His over-emotional temperament, that made it easy for him to throw himself into the play of a child, made it equally easy for him to forget his dignity in more important situations. There is evidence enough in Browning's work, without the aid of external facts, that his own temperament was not less ardent, and it is the more to his credit that he ruled himself with strenuous regard for the vital and permanent interests of character. He was helped, doubtless, by the balance struck through his mother's strong ascetic instincts. She was the daughter of William Wiedemann, a shipowner and a Hamburg German settled in Dundee. The theory of a Jewish strain reaching the poet through his mother, or his father either, is not thought tenable by Dr. Furnivall, although the question has been violently debated and can hardly be considered closed. Certainly no clear evidence of such a strain has yet been produced, and the inferences are decidedly against its existence. With the mixture of Creole, Scotch, German, and Anglo-Saxon, nothing more was needed to provide a poetic nature with source of emotional supplies. Browning's grand-

Robert Browning.

From a drawing from life by J. IV. Alexander.

Hncestr^ an& l^outb. 7

father, on his mother's side, strengthened the artistic element in his ancestry by his marked talent for both drawing and music.

Robert Browning, fifth of the name, was born on 7th May, 1812, in the parish of St. Giles, Camberwell, a suburb of London. The family were probably then living on Southhampton Street, described as " a long straggling street, starting with an air of gentility from the Peckham Road, but deteriorating at the other end." Although Camberwell has made little impression upon Browning's poetry, there is no doubt he found it a good place to grow up in. When somebody once advanced the opinion that only in Italy could one look for romance, he replied, "Ah, well ! 1 should like to include poor old Camberwell " '; and in Pauline, he writes with the sentiment of extreme youth :

As life wanes, all its care and strife and toil Seem strangely valueless, while the old trees Which grew by our youth's home, the waving mass Of climbing plants heavy with bloom and dew, The morning swallows with their songs like words, All these seem clear and only worth our thoughts :

The region must have been fairiy picturesque in the early part of the century when the green fields were not far away. Ruskin, in Prceterita, gives a charming picture of the view from Heme Hill, which was, he says, "before the railroads came, entirely lovely." One of its attractions, and the one which

' See Biographical Introduction to the Camberwell Edition of Browning's poems.

most appealed to Browning, was the woodland near Dulwich, where, during his early years, he often walked at night and sometimes till the very dawn.

An old handbook' records the healthfulness of the Peckham district in which his boyhood was spent, the winds blowing from the south toward London for more than three-fourths of the year, and keeping the air as pure as if the situation were far removed from the city. To substantiate this reputation, a remarkable list is given of Camberwell people who lived to a great age, about a dozen passing the century limit by several years. The place also adds its item or two to literary history. It was at Peckham that Goldsmith lived, a " heavy, dull-looking, mild-mannered usher in Dr. Milner's academy, and at Dulwich, the neighbouring district, Byron was put to school. Browning himself was sent — when he was about ten years old and already engaged in a mad affair of the heart — to Mr. Ready's school opposite Rye Lane, where he stayed until he was fourteen. It was, no doubt, the best school available, but the distinctive part of his education took place at home, where he found fine old books, many of them in their first editions, frequently with extra pages of his father's comments, notes, and so forth, bound in. Mrs. Orr speaks of Quarles's EmbUmes as his earliest favourite, and of Robinson Crusoe and Milton's works, first editions; of Bernard Mandeville's5^^5; of the original

> Collections Illustrative of the Geology, History, Antiquities, and Associations of Camberwell and the Neighbourhood, by Douglas Allport, 1841.

Hncestri? nrit> J^outb. 9

pamphlet, Killing No Murder, which Carlyle borrowed for his Life of Cromwell; of ancient Bibles, and so on ; a literary grove in which he paced with as much pleasure as through the lovely woods of Camberwell.

When he was eight years old he read Pope's translation of Homer and liked it, and about the same time translated the simpler odes of Horace. He tried, of course, verse-making on his own account, but Mr. Sharp declares it to be quite certain that none of these early essays, which have been " preserved without the poet's knowledge, and against his will," contains anything of genuine promise. A little volume of manuscript, which he called "Incondita," was stitched together when he was twelve years old and shown to his mother, who handed it on to some of her friends. Miss Flower (Sarah Flower Adams) and the Rev. William Johnson Fox were among this first public, and found the volume interesting. Through this dangerous experience the child passed with apparent immunity. No publisher was cajoled, and the volume was presently destroyed. At this time Browning was probably under the influence of Byron, but he had his Byronic attack so young as to escape any unpleasant sequelae, and he was already preparing the way for the interest in music and painting, which makes his poetry on those subjects alive with technicalities and different from any that has been written by any other English poet. Mrs. Orr reports that he studied music under lo IBrownina.

two masters. Mr. John Relfe, " author of a valuable work on counterpoint," instructed him in thorough bass, and Mr. Abel, a pupil of Moscheles, taught him execution. He never studied painting in any very serious fashion ; but while he lived in Peckham he was within easy reach of the Dulwich College with ;its permanent exhibition of the "Bourgeois Gallery ' of Paintings. " The name is derived from the founder and does not indicate mediocre merit on the part of the pictures, which include, in the language of the Camberwell chronicler: "Several pleasing pictures by Teniers ; some good portraits and idealities by Vandyke ; a number of sweet effects by Claude, Both, and Ruysdael ; a variety of poetical pieces by N. Poussin, and a few monstrosities and vulgarisms by Rubens, in his usual ship-carver's style."

A few years under the age at which contact with Spenser struck fire from Keats, Browning fell under the influence of Shelley and of Keats himself. Both were dead, but both were Browning's contemporaries. Born, one in 1792, and the other in 1795, they had lived in the same period and had written the mental experiences of natures not so very far removed from Browning's own. Zeal and ferment, and above these the clear intellectual vision, were common to all three, and it is no marvel at all that when Browning picked up at a bookstall a miserable pirated edition of Mr. Shelley's Atheistical Poem : very scarce, he should at once have responded to the new note of youth and artistic supremacy. Still too much a boy to hunt

Hnccstri? anb l^outb. n

things out for himself, he begged his mother to get him Shelley's works ; and, after a considerable search, Mrs. Browning procured from Ollier's a packet of books containing most of Shelley's writings, "all in their first edition, with the exception of The Cend." Mr. Oilier, with acute judgment, had included three volumes of Keats, with the assurance that he and Shelley were kindred poets. "If that packet had been lost," Mr. Sharp reflects, "we should not have had Pauline ; we might have had a different Browning." Mrs. Orr declines to accord either Shelley or Keats any important part in forming Browning's genius ; but there is little doubt that the first writer who has power to bend the twig of the young impulse is in some degree responsible for the inclination of the grown tree.

Certainly Shelley's ideas, or, to put it more precisely, the temper of the mind producing those ideas, called forth an answer from the immature intelligence not contradicted in later years. And, with Browning, to comprehend and to sympathise was to love and to render homage. The apostrophe in Pauline, beginning,

Sun-treader, life and light be thine forever 1

has an ardour far surpassing most acknowledgments from pupil to master. The familiar Memorabilia (" Ah, did you once see Shelley plain ! ") vividly communicates the magnetic thrill with which the name of Shelley was heard on the lips of one who had spoken with him and cared nothing for the experience. To Browning the bare reminiscence was "the moulted feather, the eagle feather," infinitely to be cherished. And when we come to the prose essay written in 1852, to accompany a series of unedited letters, supposed to be by Shelley (afterward discovered to be spurious), we are able to measure more accurately the depth of Browning's essential sympathy with the young rebellious soul of the earlier poet. This paragraph, the concluding one, shows how enduring the feeling was, and how fresh, after twenty years :

" It is because 1 have long held these opinions in assurance and gratitude, that I catch at the opportunity offered to me of expressing them here ; knowing that the alacrity to fulfil an humble office conveys more love than the acceptance of the honour of a higher one, and that better, therefore, than the signal service it was the dream of my boyhood to render to his fame and memory, may be the saying of a few inadequate words upon these scarcely more important supplementary letters of Shelley.'"

The opinions "long held in assurance and gratitude," and expressed at the age of forty when Browning was in his full maturity of power and experience, are worth consideration not merely for their value as criticism ; but because they offer a clue, more or less unconsciously given, to Browning's own ideals, and to the deeper springs of his thought and

' Quoted from the Essay on Shelley as reproduced in the Appendix to the Cambridge Edition of Browning's Complete Poetic and Dramatic IVritings.

Hncestri? ant) l^outb. 13

action. In admirable and lucid prose the spirit of all his poetry speaks when he calls Shelley "a moral man, because he was true, simple-hearted, and brave, and because what he acted corresponded to what he knew"; when he calls him "a man of religious mind, because every audacious negative cast up by him against the Divine was interpenetrated with a mood of reverence and adoration " ; when he refuses to confound with real infidelity and atheism of the heart the "passionate, impatient struggles of a boy towards distant truth and love, made in the dark, and ended by one sweep of the natural seas before the full moral sunrise could shine out on him." The wild impulse by which Shelley plunged from mistake to mistake, apparently at the mercy of caprice, he explains with the curious reasonableness which is found to balance his most passionate intuitions. Shelley's "early fervour and power to see," he says, "was accompanied by as precocious a fertility to contrive ; he endeavoured to realise as he went on idealising ; every wrong had simultaneously its remedy, and out of the strength of his hatred for the former, he took the strength of his confidence in the latter — till suddenly he stood pledged to the defence of a set of miserable little expedients, just as if they represented great principles, and to an attack upon various great principles, really so, without leaving himself time to examine whether because they were antagonistical to the remedy he had suggested, they must, therefore, be identical or even essentially connected with the wrong he sought to cure, — playing with blind passion into the hands of his enemies, and dashing at whatever red cloak was held forth to him, as the cause of the fireball he had last been stung with, — mistaking Churchdom for Christianity, and for marriage, ' the sale of love ' and the law of sexual oppression."

This is Browning's method of interpretation, "to see a good in evil, a hope in ill-success," a method somewhat above ordinary human standards. He formulates it in Abt Vogler ixom the subjective standpoint :

Thoughts hardly to be packed

Into a narrow act, Fancies that broke through language and escaped ;

All 1 could never be.

All, men ignored in me, This 1 was worth to God whose wheel the pitcher shaped.

Applied to Shelley, it changes the conception of him as a weak revolutionist, to a conception of him as a strong nature broken in the making, an uncompleted whole, the fragments of which had had no chance for co-ordination. Right or wrong, it is an interpretation that leans to the nobler side of judgment, and expresses the extraordinary generosity of Browning's attitude toward apparent failure.

And now, before passing to a consideration of Browning's own creative work, it will be interesting to observe one more passage from his essay on Shelley, a passage that perfectly applies to himself.

ancestry? ant) l^outb. 15

and that seems to justify any sincere attempt to connect his life with his work. After defining the interest to be found in the biography of "an objective poet, as the phrase now goes, " he continues :

" We turn with stronger needs to the genius of an

opposite tendency — the subjective poet of modern

classification. He, gifted like the objective poet with

the fuller perception of nature and man, is impelled

to embody the thing he perceives, not so much with

reference to the many below as to the one above

him, the Supreme Intelligence which apprehends all

things in their absolute truth — an ultimate view ever

aspired to, if but partially attained, by the poet's

own soul. Not what man sees, but what God sees

— the Ideas of Plato, seeds of creation lying burn-

ingly on the Divine Hand — it is toward these that he

struggles. Not with the combination of humanity in

action, but with the primal elements of humanity he

has to do ; and he digs where he stands — preferring

to seek them in his own soul as the nearest reflex of

that absolute Mind, according to the intuitions of

which he desires to perceive and speak. Such a

poet does not deal habitually with the picturesque

trees, but with their roots and fibres naked to the

chalk and stone. He does not paint pictures and

hang them on the walls, but rather carries them on

the retina of his own eyes ; we must look deep into

his human eyes to see those pictures on them. He

is rather a seer, accordingly, than a fashioner, and what he produces will be less a work than an effluence. That effluence cannot be easily considered in abstraction from his personality — being indeed the very radiance and aroma of his personality, projected from it but not separated. Therefore, in our approach to the poetry, we necessarily approach the personality of the poet ; in apprehending it we apprehend him, and certainly we cannot love it without loving him. Both for love's and for understanding's sake we desire to know him, and, as readers of his poetry, must be readers of his biography also."

Perhaps this, after all, is the most permanent debt that Browning owes to Shelley ; the first realisation that poetry may be the expression of the human soul at its most characteristic moments, that drama need not be an affair of scenes and puppets, but may be the struggle and progression of emotions and convictions in that inner theatre of the mind, which is for one observer only.

Chapter II. Pauline, Paracelsus, And Sordello

THE immediate influence of Shelley on Browning was stimulating but somewhat confusing. He seems for a time to have professed atheism and practised vegetarianism (the " couple of years or more on bread and potatoes," to which he alludes in a letter to Miss Barrett) ; but he soon gave up the latter on account of its effect upon his eyes, and the former certainly did not last long. If his strong self-consciousness found expression in manifestations that were doubtless absurd enough, his rapid development soon gave him dignity.

In 1845 he wrote to Miss Barrett that it was "not since yesterday nor ten nor twenty years before" that he had begun to look into his life and " study its end and requirements, what would turn to its good or its loss."

This looking into his life resulted in 1833 in a poem called Pauline, published anonymously by Saunders & Otley, his aunt bearing the expense. He had by this time definitely decided, with his father's approval, to become a poet by profession.

After leaving Mr. Ready's he had been no more to schools, pursuing his education at home ; but in 1829-30 he had attended Professor Long's Greek class, at the University of London, where a fellowstudent remembers him as held in esteem and regard. He was then "a bright, handsome youth with long black hair falling over his shoulders." There was at the moment some thought of his studying for the Bar, and even fifteen years later we read of ' ' dear foolish old Basil Montagu," now and then "bothering " him to read law with him gratis, but the impulse toward poetry was much too strong to be put down. He began, not precisely in the orthodox poetic fashion, by reading and inwardly digesting Johnson's dictionary.

Pauline's first appearance was made as "a large old-fashioned duodecimo volume of three sheets, its pages measuring, when uncut, 7f x 4| inches." In this poem of ten hundred and thirty lines Browning plunges boldly into his element. Apple blossoms are not more unlike the fruit than the early poems of most poets are unlike the late, but with Browning the tendencies were visibly shaped in the germ, and for this reason, if for no other, Pauline is interesting to those who read his poetry.

The preface is, characteristically, a Latin quotation from a treatise on occult philosophy by Henry Cornelius Agrippa, the French physician and astrologer, headed by a couple of lines from the Norman-French poet Marot :

Pauline, jparacelsus, anb Sorbello. 19

I am no longer what I was, Nor may I be the same again.'

The poem itself is a drama of the inner life with no events save those that take place in the mind. From the start the average reader will strike on most of the rocks of the so-called " Browning obscurity," one of the most obstructive being his habit of taking for granted a good deal of somewhat out-of-the-way knowledge on the part of the public.

We are no sooner well launched than we need our notes to remind us, if not to inform us, that "a giant standing vast in the sunset," is Atlas ; that Nestor was the "high-crested chief," who sailed " with troops of friends to Tenedos ; " that Agamemnon was he who "trod the purple calmly to his death," and so forth. Doubtless classical allusions are more familiar to English readers -of poetry than to American. They strew the debates of the House of Commons while they smack of pedantry in those of Congress, and if Browning won his way sooner on this side of the water it was despite his learned allusions, classical and other, not because of them. They remain, as he employs them, an appreciable obstacle to the ready enjoyment of him by the general reader, increasing from the comparatively slight difficulties of Pauline to those of Ferishtah's Fancies and the Parleyings.

Certainly none of the spirit of classic poetry dwelt in this first poem, or in any poem that he ever wrote.

He did not look as the Greeks looked upon the visible | world, to depict with static serenity the external features of nature. He plunged with an impulse more like that of the Hebraic writers into the depths of the .concealed life, the life of the human soul which we most of us do all we can to keep out of sight, so it is not surprising that Pauline failed to attract popular attention. Had it been much more perfectly wrought it would still have had to reckon with the instinctive opinion of the Anglo-Saxon people that it is not " good form " to talk so much about one's feelings.