The Complete Works of Robert Browning: Poems, Plays, Letters & Biographies in One Edition. Robert Browning
carving, some of it black with age, sent on from Casa Guidi, and he proceeded to transform a prim London house into an interior of singular charm. He lined the staircase with Italian pictures; books overflowed in all the rooms, and the glimpse of water in the canal near reflected the green trees of the Crescent, giving the place a hint of sylvan Arcadias. There was the grand piano on which Penini practiced, and a tutor was engaged to prepare the lad for the university. The poet felt that this was the critical time to give his son “the English stamp,” in “whatever it is good for,” he added. But as a matter of fact the young Florentine had little affinity with English ways. He was the child of poets; a linguist from his infancy, an omnivorous reader, and with marked talent for art, distinguishing himself later in both painting and sculpture, but he had little inclination for the exact sciences.
In his London home Browning was soon again launched on a tide of work,—the dearest of which was in preparing the “Last Poems” of his wife for publication. He gave it a dedication to “Grateful Florence, and Tommaseo, her spokesman.” He was also preparing a new edition of his own works to be issued in three volumes. The tutor he had secured for his son was considered skillful in “grammatical niceties,” which, he said, “was much more to my mind than to Pen’s.” But he, as well as the boy, was homesick for Italy, and he wrote to Story that his particular reward would be “just to go back to Italy, to Rome”; and he adds:
“Why should I not trust to you what I know you will keep to yourselves, but which will certainly amuse you as nothing else I could write is like to do? What good in our loving each other unless I do such a thing? So, O Story, O Emelyn, (dare I say, for the solemnity’s sake?) and O Edie, the editorship has, under the circumstances, been offered to me: me! I really take it as a compliment because I am, by your indulgence, a bit of a poet, if you like, but a man of the world and able editor hardly!”[8]
The editorship in question was that of Cornhill, left vacant by the death of Thackeray.
Browning was too great of spirit to sink into the recluse, and first beguiled into Rossetti’s studio, he soon met Millais, and by degrees he responded again to friends and friendships, and life called to him with many voices. In the late summer of 1862 the poet and his son were at “green, pleasant little Cambo,” and then at Biarritz. He was absorbed in Euripides; and the supreme work of his life, “The Ring and the Book,” the Roman murder story, as he then called it, was constantly in his thought and beginning to take shape. The sudden and intense impression that the Franceschini tragedy had made on him, on first reading it, rushed back and held him as under a spell. But the “Dramatis Personæ” and “In a Balcony” were to be completed before the inauguration of this great work.
For more than four years the thrilling tragedy had lain in his mind, impressing that subconscious realm of mental action where all great work in art acquires its creative vitality. It is said that episodes of crime had a great fascination for Browning, père, who would write out long imaginary conversations regarding the facts, representing various persons in discussion, the individual views of each being brought out. The analogy of this to the treatment of the Franceschini tragedy in his son’s great poem is rather interesting to contemplate. With the poet it was less dramatic interest in the crime, per se, than it was that the complexities of crime afforded the basis from which to work out his central and controlling purpose, his abiding and profound conviction that life here is simply the experimental and preparatory stage for the life to come; that all its events, even its lapses from the right, its fall into terrible evil, are—
“Machinery just meant
To give thy soul its bent,”
a part of the mechanism to “try the soul’s stuff on”; that man lives in an environment of spiritual influences which act upon him in just that degree to which he can recognize and respond to them; and that he must sometimes learn the ineffable blessedness of the right through tragic experiences of the wrong. In the very realities of man’s imperfection Browning sees his possibilities of
“Progress, man’s distinctive work alone.”
When Browning asks:
“And what is our failure here but a triumph’s evidence
For the fullness of the days?...”
he condenses in these lines his philosophy of life.
Many of the poems appearing in the “Dramatis Personæ” had already been written: “Gold Hair” and “James Lee’s Wife” at Pornic, and others at green Cambo. In the splendor and power of “Abt Vogler,” “Rabbi Ben Ezra,” and “A Death in the Desert,” the poet expressed a philosophy that again suggests his intuitive agreement with the Hegelian. “Rabbi Ben Ezra” holds in absolute solution the Vedanta philosophy. To the question as to what all this enigma of life means, the poet answers:
“Thence shall I pass, approved
A man, for aye removed
From the developed brute; a god though in the germ.
······
He fixed thee ’mid this dance
Of plastic circumstance,
This Present, thou, forsooth, would fain arrest.”
How keen the sense of humor and of the sharp contrasts of life in “Fra Lippo Lippi,” and what power of character analysis. The intellectual vigor and the keen insight into the play of mental action in “Bishop Blougram’s Apology”—a poem that occasioned great discussion on its appearance (from a real or fancied resemblance of the “Bishop” to Cardinal Wiseman)—are almost unsurpassed in poetic literature. Many of the poems in the “Dramatis Personæ” are aglow with the romance of life, as in the “Eurydice to Orpheus,” and “A Face,” which refers to Emily Patmore. There are studio traces as well in these, and in the “Deaf and Dumb,” suggested by a group of Woolner. The crowning power of all is revealed in the noble faith and the exquisite tenderness of “Prospice,” especially in those closing lines when all of fear and pain and darkness and cold,—
“Shall change, shall become first a peace out of pain,
Then a light, then thy breast,
O thou soul of my soul! I shall clasp thee again,
And with God be the rest!”
The references to his wife in this poem, in the enthralling “One Word More,” and in the dedication to “The Ring and the Book,” as well as those to be divined in his character drawing of “Pompilia,” are incomparable in their impressiveness and beauty, and must live so long as poetry is enshrined in life. The vital drama, the splendor of movement, the color, the impassioned exaltation of feeling, the pictorial vividness that are in these poems grouped under “Dramatic Romances” and “Dramatis Personæ,” give them claim to the first rank in the poet’s creations. Curiously, during this period, the change in Browning’s habits of work, which his wife used to urge upon him, seemed to gradually take possession of him, so that he came to count that day lost in which he had not written some lines of poetry. Did he, perchance in dreams, catch something of “the rustling of her vesture” that influenced his mind to the change? To Elizabeth Browning poetry was not only a serious calling, but its “own exceeding great reward,” always.
Another change came to Browning, which redeemed him from the growing tendency to become a recluse, and made him a familiar figure in the great world. He seemed to become aware that there was something morbid and unworthy in the avoidance of the world of men and women. Browning’s divinely commissioned work had to do with life, in its most absolute actualities as well as its great spiritual realities, because the life eternal in its nature was the theme on which he played his poetic variations, and no revelation of human nature came amiss to him.
He had already supervised the publication of Mrs. Browning’s essay on “The Greek Christian Poets” and “The Book of the Poets,” and “nothing,” he said, “that ought to be published, shall be kept back.” He had also lent