The Complete Works of Robert Browning: Poems, Plays, Letters & Biographies in One Edition. Robert Browning
which made a considerable impression on his personal life.
The Miss Flower, of whom mention has been made, was one of two sisters, both sufficiently noted for their artistic gifts to have found a place in the new Dictionary of National Biography. The elder, Eliza or Lizzie, was a musical composer; the younger, best known as Sarah Flower Adams, a writer of sacred verse. Her songs and hymns, including the well-known ‘Nearer, my God, to Thee’, were often set to music by her sister.* They sang, I am told, delightfully together, and often without accompaniment, their voices perfectly harmonizing with each other. Both were, in their different ways, very attractive; both interesting, not only from their talents, but from their attachment to each other, and the delicacy which shortened their lives. They died of consumption, the elder in 1846, at the age of forty-three; the younger a year later. They became acquainted with Mrs. Browning through a common friend, Miss Sturtevant; and the young Robert conceived a warm admiration for Miss Flower’s talents, and a boyish love for herself. She was nine years his senior; her own affections became probably engaged, and, as time advanced, his feeling seems to have subsided into one of warm and very loyal friendship. We hear, indeed, of his falling in love, as he was emerging from his teens, with a handsome girl who was on a visit at his father’s house. But the fancy died out ‘for want of root.’ The admiration, even tenderness, for Miss Flower had so deep a ‘root’ that he never in latest life mentioned her name with indifference. In a letter to Mr. Dykes Campbell, in 1881, he spoke of her as ‘a very remarkable person.’ If, in spite of his denials, any woman inspired ‘Pauline’, it can have been no other than she. He began writing to her at twelve or thirteen, probably on the occasion of her expressed sympathy with his first distinct effort at authorship; and what he afterwards called ‘the few utterly insignificant scraps of letters and verse’ which formed his part of the correspondence were preserved by her as long as she lived. But he recovered and destroyed them after his return to England, with all the other reminiscences of those early years. Some notes, however, are extant, dated respectively, 1841, 1842, and 1845, and will be given in their due place.
* She also wrote a dramatic poem in five acts, entitled ‘Vivia Perpetua’, referred to by Mrs. Jameson in her ‘Sacred and Legendary Art’, and by Leigh Hunt, when he spoke of her in ‘Blue-Stocking Revels’, as ‘Mrs. Adams, rare mistress of thought and of tears.’
Mr. Fox was a friend of Miss Flower’s father (Benjamin Flower, known as editor of the ‘Cambridge Intelligencer’), and, at his death, in 1829, became co-executor to his will, and a kind of guardian to his daughters, then both unmarried, and motherless from their infancy. Eliza’s principal work was a collection of hymns and anthems, originally composed for Mr. Fox’s chapel, where she had assumed the entire management of the choral part of the service. Her abilities were not confined to music; she possessed, I am told, an instinctive taste and judgment in literary matters which caused her opinion to be much valued by literary men. But Mr. Browning’s genuine appreciation of her musical genius was probably the strongest permanent bond between them. We shall hear of this in his own words.
Chapter 4
1826-1833
First Impressions of Keats and Shelley — Prolonged Influence of Shelley — Details of Home Education — Its Effects — Youthful Restlessness — Counteracting Love of Home — Early Friendships: Alfred Domett, Joseph Arnould, the Silverthornes — Choice of Poetry as a Profession — Alternative Suggestions; mistaken Rumours concerning them — Interest in Art — Love of good Theatrical Performances — Talent for Acting — Final Preparation for Literary Life.
At the period at which we have arrived, which is that of his leaving school and completing his fourteenth year, another and a significant influence was dawning on Robert Browning’s life — the influence of the poet Shelley. Mr. Sharp writes,* and I could only state the facts in similar words, ‘Passing a bookstall one day, he saw, in a box of second-hand volumes, a little book advertised as “Mr. Shelley’s Atheistical Poem: very scarce.”‘ … ‘From vague remarks in reply to his inquiries, and from one or two casual allusions, he learned that there really was a poet called Shelley; that he had written several volumes; that he was dead.’ … ‘He begged his mother to procure him Shelley’s works, a request not easily complied with, for the excellent reason that not one of the local booksellers had even heard of the poet’s name. Ultimately, however, Mrs. Browning learned that what she sought was procurable at the Olliers’, in Vere Street, London.’
* ‘Life of Browning’, pp. 30, 31.
Mrs. Browning went to Messrs. Ollier, and brought back ‘most of Shelley’s writings, all in their first edition, with the exception of “The Cenci”.’ She brought also three volumes of the still less known John Keats, on being assured that one who liked Shelley’s works would like these also.
Keats and Shelley must always remain connected in this epoch of Mr. Browning’s poetic growth. They indeed came to him as the two nightingales which, he told some friends, sang together in the May-night which closed this eventful day: one in the laburnum in his father’s garden, the other in a copper beech which stood on adjoining ground — with the difference indeed, that he must often have listened to the feathered singers before, while the two new human voices sounded from what were to him, as to so many later hearers, unknown heights and depths of the imaginative world. Their utterance was, to such a spirit as his, the last, as in a certain sense the first, word of what poetry can say; and no one who has ever heard him read the ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, and repeat in the same subdued tones, as if continuing his own thoughts, some line from ‘Epipsychidion’, can doubt that they retained a lasting and almost equal place in his poet’s heart. But the two cannot be regarded as equals in their relation to his life, and it would be a great mistake to impute to either any important influence upon his genius. We may catch some fleeting echoes of Keats’s melody in ‘Pippa Passes’; it is almost a commonplace that some measure of Shelleyan fancy is recognizable in ‘Pauline’. But the poetic individuality of Robert Browning was stronger than any circumstance through which it could be fed. It would have found nourishment in desert air. With his first accepted work he threw off what was foreign to his poetic nature, to be thenceforward his own never-to-be-subdued and never-to-be-mistaken self. If Shelley became, and long remained for him, the greatest poet of his age — of almost any age — it was not because he held him greatest in the poetic art, but because in his case, beyond all others, he believed its exercise to have been prompted by the truest spiritual inspiration.
It is difficult to trace the process by which this conviction formed itself in the boy’s mind; still more to account for the strong personal tenderness which accompanied it. The facts can have been scarcely known which were to present Shelley to his imagination as a maligned and persecuted man. It is hard to judge how far such human qualities as we now read into his work, could be apparent to one who only approached him through it. But the extra-human note in Shelley’s genius irresistibly suggested to the Browning of fourteen, as it still did to the Browning of forty, the presence of a lofty spirit, one dwelling in the communion of higher things. There was often a deep sadness in his utterance; the consecration of an early death was upon him. And so the worship rooted itself and grew. It was to find its lyrical expression in ‘Pauline’; its rational and, from the writer’s point of view, philosophic justification in the prose essay on Shelley, published eighteen years afterwards.
It may appear inconsistent with the nature of this influence that it began by appealing to him in a subversive form. The Shelley whom Browning first loved was the Shelley of ‘Queen Mab’, the Shelley who would have remodelled the whole system of religious belief, as of human duty and rights; and the earliest result of the new development was that he became a professing atheist, and, for two years, a practising vegetarian.