The Complete Works of Robert Browning: Poems, Plays, Letters & Biographies in One Edition. Robert Browning
Salève, the mountain overlooking the Arve and the Rhone Valley, is one of the most wildly picturesque points in all the Alpine region. The chalet of “La Saisiaz” was perched on this mountain spur, about half-way up the mountain, on a shelving terrace, with vast and threatening rocks rising behind. The poem called “La Saisiaz” is one of Browning’s greatest. It is full of mystical questioning and of his positive and radiant assertions of faith; it abounds in vivid and exquisite scenic effects, and it has the personal touches of tenderness. The morning after her death is thus pictured:
“No, the terrace showed no figure, tall, white, leaning through the wreaths, Tangle-twine of leaf and bloom that intercept the air one breathes.”
Browning and Miss Egerton-Smith had first met in Florence. She was an English lady of means (being part proprietor of the Liverpool Mercury) and of a reserve of temperament which kept her aloof from people in general. With the poet and his sister she was seen in all that cordial sweetness of her nature which her sensitive reserve veiled from strangers.
Italy again! A sapphire sky bending over hills and peaks and terraces swimming in violet shadows; villas, and sudden views, and arching pianterreni, and winding roads between low stone walls hidden in their riotous overgrowth of roses! And the soft air, the tall black cypresses against the sky, the sunsets and the stars, and golden lights, and dear Italian phrases! The trailing ivy vines all in a tangle; the wayside shrine, the vast white monastery perched on an isolated mountain top; the flaming scarlet of the poppies in the grass, the castles and battlements dimly caught on the far horizon,—the poetry, the loveliness, the ineffable beauty of Italy! Seventeen years had passed since that midsummer day when the dear form of his “Lyric Love” had been laid under the Florentine lilies, when Browning, in the spring of 1878, returned to his Italy. What dreams and associations thronged upon him!
“Places are too much,
Or else too little for immortal man,—
······
... thinking how two hands before
Had held up what is left to only one.”
Seventeen years had passed, but Venice, the ethereal city, the mystic dream of sea and sky, was unchanged, and, however unconsciously, the poet was now to initiate another era, another new “state” in his life. He never again went farther south than Venice; he could never see Florence or Rome again, where she had lived beside him; but the dream city now became for him a second and dearer home. With his sister Sarianna, he broke the journey by lingering in a hotel on the summit of the Splügen, where he indulged himself in those long walks which he loved, Miss Browning often accompanying him down the Via Cala Mala, or to the summit where they could look down into Lombardy. Browning was at work on his “Dramatic Idyls,” and not only “Ivan Ivanovitch,” but several others were written on the Splügen. Pausing at Lago di Como, and a day in Verona, they made their way to Asolo, “my very own of all Italian cities,” the poet would say of it. Asolo, which from its rocky hilltop, has an outlook over all Veneto,—over all Italy, it would almost seem, for the towers and domes of Venice are visible on a clear day,—gave its full measure of joy to Browning, and when they descended into Venice they were domiciled in the Palazzo Brandolin-Rota, on the Grand Canal, near the Accademia. In Venice he met a Russian lady whom he consulted about some of the names he was giving to the characters in his “Ivan Ivanovitch.”
The success of his son in the Paris Salon and other exhibitions was a continual happiness to Mr. Browning. Both in Paris and in London the pictures of Barrett Browning were accorded an honorable place “on the line”; he received a medal from the Salon, and there was not wanting, either, that commercial side of success that sustains its theory. The young artist had now seriously entered on sculpture, under Rodin, with much prestige and promise.
The first series of “Dramatic Idyls” was published in the autumn of 1872, closely following “La Saisiaz” and the “Two Poets of Croisic.” The devoted student of Browning could hardly fail to be impressed by one feature of his poetry which, though a prominent one, has received little attention from the critics. This feature is his doctrine of the sub-self, as the source of man’s highest spiritual knowledge. He has given his fullest expression of this belief in his “Paracelsus,” and it appears in “Sordello” (especially in the fifth book), in “A Death in the Desert,” in “Fifine,” and in “Christopher Smart,” and is largely developed in “The Ring and the Book.” Again, in “Beatrice Signorini,” contained in “Asolando,” published only on the day of his death, this theory is again apparent, and these instances are only partial out of the many in which the doctrine is touched or elaborated, showing how vital it was with him from the earliest to the latest period of his work. Another striking quality in Browning is that of the homogeneous spirit of his entire poetic expression. It is the great unity in an equally great variety. It is always clear as to the direction in which Browning is moving, and as to the supreme message of his philosophy of life.
CHAPTER XI
1880-1888
“Moreover something is or seems,
That touches me with mystic gleams,
Like shadows of forgotten dreams.”
“Alas! our memories may retrace
Each circumstance of time and place,
Season and change come back again,
And outward things unchanged remain;
The rest we cannot re-instate;
Ourselves we cannot re-create;
Nor set our souls to the same key
Of the remembered harmony!”
“Les Charmettes”—Venetian Days—Dr. Hiram Corson—The Browning Society—Oxford Honors Browning—Katherine DeKay Bronson—Honors from Edinburgh—Visit to Professor Masson—Italian Recognition—Nancioni—The Goldoni Sonnet—At St. Moritz—In Palazzo Giustiniani—“Ferishtah’s Fancies”—Companionship with his Son—Death of Milsand—Letters to Mrs. Bronson—DeVere Gardens—Palazzo Rezzonico—Sunsets from the Lido—Robert Barrett Browning’s Gift in Portraiture.
Twenty-five years after Robert Browning had visited the famous haunts of Rousseau with his wife, he again made a little sojourn with his sister in lovely Chambéry, making various excursions in all the picturesque region about, and again visiting “Les Charmettes,” which Miss Browning had not before seen; as before, Browning sat down to the old harpsichord, attempting to play “Rousseau’s Dream,” but only two notes of the antique instrument responded to his touch. Through all the wonderful scenery of the Mont Cenis pass they proceeded to Turin and thence to Venice, where they arrived in the midst of the festivities of the Congress Carnival in September of 1881. The Storys, whom Browning had anticipated meeting in Venice, had gone to Vallombrosa, where their daughter (the Marchesa Peruzzi di’ Medici) had a villa, to which the family retired in summer from their stately old palace in Florence. Mr. Story’s two sons, the painter and the sculptor, both had studios in Venice at this time, and Mr. Browning often strolled into these. Among other friends Browning and his sister visited the Countess Mocenigo, who was ensconced in the same palace that Byron had occupied. She showed her guests through all the rooms with their classic associations, and Browning sat down to the desk at which Byron had written the last canto of “Childe Harold.” To the satisfaction of the Brownings, Venice soon regained her usual quiet,—that wonderful silence broken only by the plash of water against marble steps, and the cries of the gondoliers,—and he resumed his long walks, often accompanied by Miss Browning, exploring every curious haunt and lingering in shops and squares. The poet familiarized himself with the enchanting dream city, as no tours in gondolas alone could ever do. To him Venice came to be dear beyond words, and soon after he made all arrangements to