The Complete Works of Robert Browning: Poems, Plays, Letters & Biographies in One Edition. Robert Browning
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 figtree 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