The Complete Works of Robert Browning: Poems, Plays, Letters & Biographies in One Edition. Robert Browning
a deep impression on Elizabeth Barrett, as the numbers, opening with “Pippa Passes,” successively appeared between 1841 and 1846. Of “Pippa” she said she could find it in her heart to covet the authorship, and she felt all the combinations of effect to be particularly “striking and noble.” In a paper that Miss Barrett wrote in these days for the Athenæum, critically surveying the poetic outlook of the time, she referred to Browning and Tennyson as “among those high and gifted spirits who would still work and wait.” When this London journal reviewed (not too favorably) Browning’s “Romances and Lyrics,” Miss Barrett took greatly to heart the injustice that she felt was done him, and reverted to it in a number of personal letters, expressing her conviction that “it would be easier to find a more faultless writer than a poet of equal genius.” An edition of Tennyson, in two volumes, came out, including the “Ulysses,” “Morte d’Arthur,” “Locksley Hall,” and “Œnone,” of which she says no one quite appeals to her as does “Œnone,” and she expresses her belief that philosophic thinking, like music, is always involved in high ideality of any kind. Wordsworth she insisted upon estimating from his best, not from his poorest work, and his “Ode” was to her so grand as to atone for a multitude of poetic sins. “I confess,” she wrote to Boyd, “that he is not unfrequently heavy and dull, and that Coleridge has an intenser genius.” To her cousin, Kenyon, Miss Barrett sent the manuscript of her poem, “The Dead Pan,” which he showed to Browning, who wrote of it to Kenyon with ardent admiration. This note was sent to Miss Barrett, who displayed it to Horne that he might see the opinion of the poet whom they both admired. Still later, Horne published in his “New Spirit of the Age” sketches of several writers with their portraits; and those of Carlyle, Miss Martineau, Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Browning, Miss Barrett had framed for her own room. She asked Kenyon if that of Browning were a good one. “Rather like,” he replied. So here and there the Fates were invisibly at work, forging the subtle threads that were drawing the poets unconsciously nearer.
It was the suggestion of Browning’s publisher, Moxon, that “Bells and Pomegranates” might be issued in pamphlet form, appearing at intervals, as this plastic method would be comparatively inexpensive, and would also permit the series to be stopped at any time if its success was not of a degree to warrant continuance. The poet found his title, as he afterward explained in a letter to Miss Barrett, in Exodus, “... upon the hem of the robe thou shalt make pomegranates of blue and of purple, and of scarlet, and bells of gold between them round about.” After “Pippa Passes” there followed “King Victor and King Charles,” a number of Lyrics, “The Return of the Druses,” “A Blot in the ’Scutcheon,” “Luria,” and “A Soul’s Tragedy.” On each of the title-pages the author was named as the writer of “Paracelsus,” “Sordello” being ignored. Among the dedications of these several numbers those so honored included John Kenyon, Proctor, and Talfourd.
Browning offered “A Blot in the ’Scutcheon” to Macready (whose stage fortunes at this period were not brilliant), with the remark that “The luck of the third venture is proverbial.” The actor consulted Forster, who passed the play on to Dickens, to whom it deeply appealed. Under date of November 25, 1842, Dickens wrote of it to Forster in the most enthusiastic words, saying the reading of it had thrown him “into a perfect passion of sorrow,” and that it was “full of genius, natural, and great thoughts,... and I swear it is a tragedy that must be played, and played by Macready,” continued the novelist. “And tell Browning that I believe from my soul there is no man living (and not many dead) who could produce such a work.” Forster did not, however, administer this consolation to the young author, who was only to learn of Dickens’s admiration thirty years later, when Forster’s biography of him appeared. The story of the production of the play is told in a letter from Joseph Arnould to Alfred Domett (then in New Zealand), written under date of May, 1843, dated from Arnould’s home in Victoria Square, Pimlico:
“As one must begin somewhere, suppose we take Browning.... In February his play, ‘A Blot in the ’Scutcheon,’ was announced as forthcoming at Drury Lane.... Meantime, judicious friends had a habit of asking when the play was coming out....”[5]
A long chapter of vexations is humorously described by Domett, who concludes his letter with this tribute to the play.
“... With some of the finest situations and grandest passages you can conceive, it does undoubtedly want a sustained interest to the end of the third act; in fact the whole of that act on the stage is a falling off from the second, which I need not tell you is, for purposes of performance, the most unpardonable fault. Still, it will no doubt—nay, it must—have done this, viz., produced a higher opinion than ever of Browning’s genius and the great things he is yet to do, in the minds not only of a clique, but of the general world of readers. This man will go far yet....”
While this vexation cancelled the friendly relations that had existed between Browning and Macready, it fostered the friendship between the poet and Helen Faucit (later Lady Martin), who remembered Browning’s attitude “as full of generous sympathy” for the actors of the cast; while he recalled Miss Faucit’s “perfect behavior as a woman, and her admirable playing, as the one gratifying factor” in the affair. But Browning was too noble by nature for any lasting resentment, and meeting Macready soon after the death of both his own wife, in Italy, and of Mrs. Macready, he could only grasp his old friend’s hand and exclaim with emotion, “Oh, Macready!”
In the autumn of 1844 Browning set forth for Italy on his second visit. Two years before his friend Domett had left England for New Zealand, commemorated by the poet in the lines,—
“How, forsooth, was I to know it
If Waring meant to glide away
Like a ghost at break of day.”
Browning landed at Naples, and there, according to Mrs. Orr, he became acquainted with a young Neapolitan, Signor Scotti, who took the bargaining of their tour upon himself, after they had agreed to travel together, “and now as I write,” said Mr. Browning in a letter from his Naples hotel to his sister Sarianna, “I hear him disputing our bill. He does not see why we should pay for six wax candles when we have used only two.” The pair wandered over the enchanting shores of all the Naples region, lingered in Sorrento, drove over the picturesque road to Amalfi, and listened to the song of the sirens along the shore. Their arrival in Rome was Browning’s first sight of the Eternal City. Here Mr. Browning found an old friend, the Contessa Carducci, with whom the two passed most of their evenings. He made his poetic pilgrimage to the graves of Shelley and Keats, as do all later pilgrims, and he visited the grotto of Egeria in memory of Byron. He loitered in the old chiesa near Santa Maria Maggiore, where the sixteenth century Bishop “ordered his tomb,” and he visited Trelawney in Leghorn. There exists little record of this trip save in the poem “The Englishman in Italy,” and his return to England through Germany is alike unrecorded.
Six years had passed since the publication of “The Seraphim and Other Poems,” and on Mr. Browning’s arrival at home again, he found two new volumes of Miss Barrett’s, entitled simply “Poems,” in which were “A Drama of Exile,” “Bertha in the Lane,” “Catarina to Camoens,” “A Vision of Poets,” nearly all of the sonnets that she ever wrote save that immortal sequence, “Sonnets from the Portuguese,” and “Lady Geraldine’s Courtship.” These volumes absolutely established her poetic rank with that of Tennyson and Browning. She “heard the nations praising her far off.” While she had many expressions of grateful gladness for all this chorus of praise with hardly a dissenting voice, the verdict did not affect her own high standards. “I have written these poems as well as I could,” she says, “and I hope to write others better. I have not reached my own ideal ... but I love poetry more than I love my own successes in it.”
Her love of absolute truth, and the absence of any petty self-love in her character, stand out in any study of her life. “Why, if you had told me that my books were without any value in your eyes, do you imagine that I should not have valued you, reverenced you ever after for your truth, so sacred a thing in friendship?” she writes to a friend.
The reviews