Robert Browning's prose life of Strafford

I. Robert Browning’s

PROSE

LIFE OF STRAFFORD.

ROBERT BROWNING’S

PROSE

LIFE OF STRAFFORD,

WITH AN

By C. H. firth, M.A., OxON.,

AND

By F. J. FURNIVALL, M.A., Hon. Dr. Phil.

ESTES AND LAURIAT, BOSTON, MASS. U.S.A.

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By F. J. FURNIVALL.

Three times during his life did Browning speak to me about his prose Life of Strafford. The first time he said only — in the course of chat — that very few people had any idea of how much he had helpt John Forster in it. The second time he told me at length that one day he went to see Forster and found him very ill, and anxious about the Life of Strafford^ which he had promist to write at once, to complete a volume of Lives of Eminent British Statesmen for LardneFs Cabinet Cyclopcedia, Forster had finisht the Life of Eliot — the first in the volume — and had just begun that of Strafford, for which he had made full collections and extracts ; but illness had come on, he couldn't work, the book ought to be completed forthwith, as it was due in the serial issue of volumes ; what was he to do ? * Oh,'

said Browning, ‘don’t trouble about it. Fll take your papers and do it for you.' Forster thankt his young friend heartily. Browning put the Strafford papers under his arm, walkt off, workt hard, finisht the Life, and it came out to time in 1836, to Forster’s f

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great relief, and past under his name. A third time — in the spring of 1889, I think, almost the last time I saw Browning — he began to tell me how he had written almost all Forster^s Life of Strafford ; but I stopt him by saying that he’d told me before, and we went on to chat of something else.

At the first and second times, I had the Eminent Bntish Statesmen on my shelves, .and once thought of reading the Life of Strafford and asking the poet to 'point out his large share of it to me. But life in London is such a hurry that anything which gets into a busy man’s head is driven out by another thing within the next halfhour. Later, my Statesmen volumes went to one of the Free Libraries that appeald to me for books, and I never lookt at the Life of Strafford till after Browning’s death. Then Prof. S. R. Gardiner one day in the British Museum renewd our talk of some years before about this Life. I took it off the shelves, read the last paragraph (p. 278 below) and felt — as every other Browning student will feel — that I could swear it was Browning’s. Let the reader judge : —

A great lesson is written in the life of this truly extraordinary person. In the career of Strafford is to be sought the justification of the world’s “appeal from tyranny to God.” In him Despotism had at length obtained an instrument with mind to comprehend, and resolution to act upon, her principles in their length and breadth, — and enough of her purposes were effected by him, to enable mankind to see “ as from a tower the end of all.” I cannot discern one false step in Strafford’s public conduct, one glimpse of a recognition of an alien principle, one instance of a dereliction of the law of his being, which can come in to dispute the decisive result of the experiment, or explain away its failure. The least vivid fancy will have no difficulty in taking up the interrupted design^

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and by wholly enfeebling^ or materially emboldenings the insignificaftt nature of Charles ; and by according some half-dozen years of imniunity to the fretted tenement''' of Strafford's ^ffe^y souls'" — con¬ template theUs for itself the perfect realisation of the scheme of “ 7nakmg the prince the most absolute lord m Christendom^' That donCs — let it pursue the same course with respect to Eliot's 7ioble imagmingSs or to young Vane's dreamy aspiringSs and apply in like mamier a fit machuiery to the working out the projects which made the dungeon of the 07ie a holy places o,nd sustained the other hi his self-imposed exile. — The result is great and decisive ! It establishes, in renewed force, those principles of political conduct which have endured, and must continue to endure, “like truth from age to age.”

Is it not clear that the passage in italics is a poet’s conception, and not a historian’s ? Is it not clear that Browning had thought of a character-study of Strafford, Eliot and Vane, a monodrama of each, which — like Andrea del Sarto ^ Fra Lippo Lippi and the like — would have been to us worth half-a-dozen of his drama of Strafford I Does not the fact of Browning’s having written, or being engaged on, the Life of Strafford in 1836, explain why — when Macready, on May 26, 1836, askt Browning to write him a play, — the poet at once suggested Strafford: Stojfprd, a- man intensely interest¬ ing to the analyser of character in verse, — a man knowing the better and choosing the worse, — but impossible for a dramatist who brings in the heroes of the Common¬ wealth, unless he alters the facts of history; just as im¬ possible as Shakspere found King John, tho’ he could keep his Bastard Falconbridge clear of annals.

When I first spoke to Prof. S. R. Gardiner about the Life of Strafford, I found that he knew Browning’s authorship of almost all of it, and was convinst of the fact from his own knowledge of Forster’s work and of

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history. ‘ It is not a historian’s conception of the cha- ^ racter, but a poet’s. I am certain that it’s not Forster’s.’ ‘Yes,* it makes mistakes in facts and dates, but, it has got the man — in the main.’ Prof. Gardiner had also seen a letter of Browning’s — now no longer extant, he believes — in which Browning claimd his part of the Zi/e of Strafford.^ as he also did in talk with the Professor in like words to those he used to me. The fact of Browning’s authorship is also known to his family and close friends. No doubt can exist on the point, though here and thep in the Life an ‘ I ’ (as if John Forster’s) occurs as a deliberate blind. The only question is, where Browning starts, and whether — as Mr. Firth sug¬ gests — he incorporated any of Forster’s work in his text. Of the latter point I am not able to judge; but on the former, I recollect Browning’s use of waddle in his goosecritic letter,

“19 Waiuuick Crescent., W, February loth, 1887.

“ Dear Sir,

“ I am sure you mean very kindly, but I have had too long an experience of the inability of the human goose to do other than cackle when benevolent, and hiss when malicious ; and no amount of goose criticism shall make me lift a heel against what waddles behind it.

‘‘ Believe me, dear sir, yours very sincerely,

‘‘Robert Browning.”

(Brow7i{ng Society s Papers, Part IX, p. 187.)

and I claim as Browning’s the passage on James I, p. 7 below :

“ He wrote mystical definitions of the prerogative, and polite ‘ Counterblasts to Tobacco ’ ; issued forth dam-

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IX nation to the deniers of witchcraft, and poured out the wrath of the Apocalypse upon popery ; but whenever an obvious or judicious truth seemed likely to fall in his way, his pen infallibly waddled off from it/^

On p. 6, I think this opinion of James I is also Browning’s : ‘‘ He was not an absolute fool, and little more can be said of him.” Also, above it, He came to this country in an ecstasy of infinite relief” strikes me as Browning’s and not Forster’s ; and I suppose that Browning started with the second paragraph on p. 6. “James I had many reasons to be weary of his own kingdom,” &c.

Other pieces that I think like Browning are the sentence (with quotations) 3 pages long on p. 69-71, from In one and the same day, to laugh together ; that of nearly a page, 241-2, from “It was well and beautifully said ” to a different devotion ; ” pages 60-4 with the “divers ill-spelt ^ and solemn sillinesses from the king,” the “ prism of Circumstance ” and the reference to the Ezzelin of Sordello, which Browning had set aside to write this Life and his play of Strafford — what had Forster to do with Ezzelin? — the discussion of Strafford’s character, and his “ fatal liking for the weak and un¬ worthy king ” ; p. 124-6, with their “ pick-thank chuckle of old good-humour,” their

“ Pleasure was a Silenus in the court of James. In that of Charles the Second, it was a vulgar satyr. Under

^ Later printers’ readers would have uniformd this into ‘spelled/ as they’ve done ‘burnt,’ ‘dipt,’ into ‘burned,’ ‘dipped,’ &c. When will one, more consistent than his fellows, turn ‘Jesus wept,' into weeped? ‘Leapt’ has past into ‘leaped,’ &c. The British public follow their blind guides into the ditch.

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Charles the First, it was still of the breed, but it was a god Pan, and the muses piped among his nymphs. . . . As nine-tenths of common gallantry is pure vanity, so a like proportion of the graver offence of deliberate seduc¬ tion is owing to pure will and the love of power, — the love of obtaining a strong and sovereign sense of an existence not very sensitive, at any price to the existence of another ” (p. 125):

“ It is a vulgar spirit only that can despise a woman for making no remonstrances ; and a brutal one, that can ill-treat her for it. A heart with any nobleness left in it, keeps its sacredest and dearest corner for a kindness so angelical '' (p. ,126).

But I should weary the reader if I extracted bits in which I see Browning's touch, on pages 21, 30, 49, 59,

and the whole close of the volume. I however note that J Browning owed much to Donne, and that he mentions Strafford’s care for that poet too :

“The soul of the earl of Strafford was indeed lodged, to use the expression of his favourite Donne, within a Mow and fatal room’ (p. 228). “But ever by the side of the body’s weakness we find a witness of the spirit’s triumph, — a vindication of the mightiness of will ! ” (p. 229). “Then, when every energy was to be taxed to the uttermost, the question of his fiery spirit’s supremacy was indeed put to the issue, by a complication of ghastly diseases ! ” (p. 230).

X There are also bits of analysis and philosophizing on S character which are surely Browning’s ; and above all j there are the conception and working out of the per- ^ sonality and character of Strafford, “ that he was con¬ sistent to himself throughout ” (p. 60 at foot), that his one object was to make Charles “ the most absolute lord in

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Christendom,’^ and that this explains all apparent incon¬ sistencies and vanities in his conduct. The Zi/e alscn seems to me written by a man who did not know the ! ^ period thoroughly, and did not work the details of con-y temporary history into it as a historian familiar with them would have done. It is the work of a poet-analyser of ‘ a statesman’s character, rather than a historian’s picturing of him in his own time and surroundings.

The present reprint is due to Mr. Dana Estes, the Chair¬ man of the Boston Browning Society. Both Messrs. Smith & Elder, and Messrs. Longmans (whose firm publisht the original edition of 1836 in Lardner’s Cabinet Cyclopcedia) declined to reprint the Life of Strafford. Mr. Dana Estes is head of the firm of Estes and Lauriat in Boston, U.S.A., and had seen a reproduction of my letter in the Pall Mall Gazette of April 12, 1890, claiming the work for Browning. He wrote to me that his firm would share the cost of the reprint with any other publisher if I could find one. I accepted his offer on behalf of the Browning Society, and agreed that none of its copies should be sent for sale to the United States.

It was of course necessary to have the book up to date, and to get the views of a modern historian on it and Strafford. Prof. S. R. Gardiner and Mr. C. H. Firth of ^ Oxford are the acknowledged authorities on the period ; ^ and as Prof. Gardiner was too busy and also felt somewhat bound by Browning’s desire that he should not make B.’s authorship public, Mr. Firth most kindly under¬ took to write the Introduction needed for the Life., and compile us a table of the chief dates and events in

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Strafford's career. (The reader will notice how few dates Browning, poet-like, has given.) Mr. Firth also suggested the addition of an Appendix II of the chief fresh Letters and documents of and about Strafford, which Prof. Gardiner and others have printed of late years. Our London and Boston Browning Societies are greatly in¬ debted to Mr. Firth for his valuable help, and all Browning students will thank him for his contribution to this book. They will also feel grateful to our member Mr. Benjamin Sagar, for his famously full Index.

3 St. Georgi s Sqr. London^ N. W.

26 November^ 1890.

By C. H. firth.

Forster in the life of Eliot, which he published in ^ 1836, quotes a few lines from a poet, “whose genius,” he says, “ has just risen amongst us.” In a footnote he explains that the writer of the verses is “ the author of Paracelsus^ Mr. Robert Browning. There would be little danger in predicting that this writer will soon be acknowledged as a first-rate poet. He has already proved himself one.” ^ Under what circumstances it was that Browning undertook to write the life of Strafford for his friend Forster, Dr. Furnivall explains in his ‘Forewords.’

A biography written under such conditions naturally shows occasional traces of haste and incompleteness. ^ Moreover, the evidence at the disposal of a biographer in 1836 was in many respects defective; and time has brought to light so many new facts and new documents that there is much to add to any life of Strafford written so long ago, and something to correct in it.

On the other hand, even in 1836 a biographer of Strafford had a larger amount of information at his dis¬ posal than in the case of any other statesman of the

*

^ British Statesmen^ vol. ii. p. 104,

\IV seventeenth century. The article in Biographia Britari’ nica,, and the life in Macdiar mid’s British Statesmen^ supplied Browning with two tolerably full and careful accounts of Strafford’s career. He had also Sir George Radcliffe’s invaluable memoir of his friend, and the admirable selection from Strafford’s letters published by Dr. Knowler in 1739. Of this last Browning observes : “The collection of documents known by the title of the Strafford papers, seems to me to contain with¬ in itself every material necessary to the illustration of the public and private character of this statesman, on an authority which very few will be disposed to contest, for the record is his own. . . . Hereafter I mean to restrict myself almost entirely to the authorities, illustrations, and suggestions of character, that are so abundantly furnished by that great work.”

Evidently the subject which from the first attracted Browning was Strafford’s character rather than his career. Unlike some biographers, he does not treat his hero merely as one of a series of statesmen, and confine himself to his public life, “as if the shop were all the house.” He is interested in every aspect of Strafford’s life, and every side of his character. He shows us what sort of a husband and father he was, and how faithful a friend. He describes his daily habits, his recreations, and his tastes. He brings out his fondness for fishing, hawking, and hunting, as well as his love of art and poetry.

Browning’s conception of biography is further illus¬ trated by the passage in which he discusses Strafford’s

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