Selections From The Poems And Plays Of Robert Browning Part 1

Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning.

by Robert Browning.

INTRODUCTION

THE LIFE OF BROWNING

Robert Browning, the poet, was the third of that name. The first Robert Browning, a man of energy and ability, held an important post in the Bank of England. His wife, Margaret t.i.ttle, was a Creole from the West Indies, and at the time of her marriage her property was still in the estates owned by her father near St. Kitts. When their son, the second Robert, was seven years of age, his mother died, and his father afterwards married again. The second wife's ascendency over her husband was unfortunately exerted against the best interests of the son. His desire to become an artist, his wish for a university training, were disregarded, and he was sent instead to St. Kitts, where he was given employment on his mother's sugar plantations. The breach between Robert and his father became absolute when the boy defied local prejudice by teaching a negro to read, and when, because of what his father considered a sentimental objection to slavery, he finally refused to remain in the West Indies. The young man returned to England and at twenty-two started on an independent career as a clerk in the Bank of England. In 1811 he married Sarah Anne Wiedemann. They settled in Camberwell, London, where Robert, the poet, was born, May 7, 1812, and his sister Sarianna in 1814.

Browning's father was a competent official in the Bank and a successful business man, but his tastes were aesthetic and literary, and his leisure time was accordingly devoted to such pursuits as the collection of old books and ma.n.u.scripts. He also read widely in both cla.s.sic and modern literatures. The first book of the _Iliad_ he knew by heart, and all the _Odes_ of Horace, and he was accustomed to soothe his child to sleep by humming to him s.n.a.t.c.hes of Anacreon to the tune of "A Cottage in the Wood." Mr. Browning had also considerable skill in two realms of art, for he drew vigorous portraits and caricatures, and he had, even according to his son's mature judgment, extraordinary force and facility in verse-making. In character he was serene, lovable, gentle, "tenderhearted to a fault." So instinctively chivalrous was he that there was "no service which the ugliest, oldest, crossest woman in the world might not have exacted of him." He was a man of great physical vigor, dying at the age of eighty-four without ever having been ill.

Browning's mother was the daughter of William Wiedemann, a German who had settled in Dundee and married a Scotch wife. Mrs. Browning impressed all who knew her by her sweetness and goodness. Carlyle spoke of her as "the true type of a Scottish gentlewoman"; her son's friend, Mr. Kenyon, said that such as she had no need to go to heaven, because they made it wherever they were; and her son called her "a divine woman." She had deep religious instincts and concerned herself particularly with her son's moral and spiritual development. The bond between them was always very strong, and when she died in 1849 his wife wrote, "He has loved his mother as such pa.s.sionate natures can love, and I never saw a man so bowed down in an extremity of sorrow--never."

Robert Browning's childhood was pa.s.sed in an unusually serene and happy home. In _Development_ he tells how, at five years of age, he was made to understand the main facts of the Trojan War by his father's clever use of the cat, the dogs, the pony in the stable, and the page-boy, to impersonate the heroes of that ancient conflict. Latin declensions were taught the child by rhymes concocted by his father as memory-easing devices. Stories and even lessons were made intelligible and vivid by colored maps and comic drawings. Until the boy was fourteen, his schooling was of the most casual sort, his only formal training being such as he received in the comparatively unimportant three or four years he spent, after he was ten, at Mr. Ready's private school. His real education came, through all his early life, from his home. What would now be called nature-study he pursued ardently and on his own initiative in the home garden and neighboring fields. His love for animals was inherited from his mother and fostered by her. He used to keep, says Mrs. Orr in her account of his life, "owls and monkeys, magpies and hedge-hogs, an eagle, and even a couple of large snakes, constantly bringing home the more portable animals in his pockets and transferring them to his mother for immediate care." Browning says that his faculty of observation at this time would not have disgraced a Seminole Indian.

In the matter of reading he was not entirely without advice and guidance, but was, on the whole, allowed unusual freedom of choice. He afterwards told Mrs. Orr that Milton, Quarles, Voltaire, Mandeville, and Horace Walpole were the authors in whom, as a boy, he particularly delighted. His love for art was established and developed by visits to the Dulwich picture gallery, of which he afterwards wrote to Miss Barrett with "love and grat.i.tude" because he had been allowed to go there before the age prescribed by the rules, and had thus learned to know "a wonderful Rembrandt," a Watteau, "three triumphant Murillos," a Giorgione Music Lesson, and various Poussins. His marked early susceptibility to music is evidenced by an incident narrated by Mr.

Sharp: "One afternoon his mother was playing in the twilight to herself.

She was startled to hear a sound behind her. Glancing round she beheld a little white figure distinct against an oak bookcase, and could just discern two large wistful eyes looking earnestly at her. The next moment the child had sprung into her arms, sobbing pa.s.sionately at he knew not what, but, as his paroxysm subsided, whispering with shy urgency: 'Play!

Play!'"

In various ways the boy Robert was noticeably precocious. He could not remember a time, he said, when he did not rhyme, and his sister records that as a very little boy he used to walk around the table "spanning out on the smooth mahogany the scansion of verses he had composed." Some of these early lines he could recall and he could recall, too, the prodigious satisfaction with which he uttered them, especially the sentence he put into the mouth of a man who had just committed murder--"Now my soul is satisfied." At twelve he had a volume named _Incondita_ ready for publication. To discerning eyes the little volume was a production of great promise, dominated though it was by the influence of his father's idol, Pope, and of his own temporary ruling deity, Byron. But a publisher was not found, and in later years, at Browning's request, the two extant ma.n.u.script copies of _Incondita_ were destroyed, along with many others of his youthful poems that had been preserved by his father.

Browning's early tastes in the realm of poetry were, on the whole, romantic. "Now here is the truth," he wrote to Miss Barrett, "the first book I ever bought in my life was Ossian--and years before that the first _composition_ I ever was guilty of was something in _imitation_ of Ossian whom I had not read, but _conceived_, through two or three sc.r.a.ps in other books." But the decisive literary influence was yet to come. When he was fourteen he happened to see on a bookstall a volume marked, "Mr. Sh.e.l.ley's Atheistical Poem. Very Scarce"; and he at once wished to know more of this Mr. Sh.e.l.ley. After a perplexing search his mother found the desired poems, most of them in first editions, at the Olliers, Vere Street, London. She took home also three volumes by another poet, John Keats, who, she was told, was the subject of an elegy by Sh.e.l.ley. Browning never forgot the May evening when he first read these new books, to the accompaniment, he said, of two nightingales, one in a copper-beech, one in a laburnum, each striving to outdo the other in melody. A new imaginative world was opened to the boy. In _Memorabilia_ he afterwards recorded the strong intellectual and emotional excitement, the thrill and ecstasy of this poetical experience. To Sh.e.l.ley especially did he give immediate and fervid personal loyalty, even to the extent of endeavoring to follow him in "atheism" and vegetarianism.

When at fourteen the boy left Mr. Ready's school it was decided that his further education should be carried on at home under private tutors. He studied music under able masters, one in thorough-ba.s.s, and one in execution. He played and sang, and he composed spirited settings for songs. He read voraciously. He took lessons in dancing, riding, boxing, and fencing, and is said to have shown himself exceptionally active and vigorous. He kept up his interest in art, and he practiced drawing from casts. He found time also for various friends.h.i.+ps. For Miss Eliza and Miss Sarah Flower, two sisters, nine and seven years his senior, he had a deep affection. Both young ladies were gifted in music, and this was one source of their attractions for the music-loving boy. Miss Sarah Flower wrote sacred hymns, the best known of which is "Nearer my G.o.d to Thee," and her sister composed music which Browning, even in his mature years, ranked as of especial significance. Other friends of this period were Joseph Arnold, afterwards Chief Justice of Bombay, and a man of great ability; Alfred Domett, a striking and interesting personality described by Browning in a poem beginning "What's Become of Waring," and referred to in "The Guardian Angel"; and the three Silverthorne boys, his cousins, the death of one of whom was the occasion of the poem "May and Death."

In spite of friends, a beautiful home, and congenial work, this period of home tutelage does not seem to have been altogether happy. His sister in commenting on this period said, "The fact was, poor boy, he had outgrown his social surroundings. They were absolutely good, but they were narrow; it could not be otherwise; he chafed under them."

Furthermore, the youth, before he had found his real work as a poet, was restless, irritable, and opinionated; and an ever-present cause of friction was the fact that there were few subjects of taste on which he and his father did not disagree. Their poetic tastes were especially at variance. The father counted Pope supreme in poetry, and it was many years before he could take pleasure in the form in which his son's genius expressed itself. All the more noteworthy, then, is the generosity with which Mr. Browning looked after his son's interests through the unprofitable early years of his poetic career, a generosity never lost sight of by the son. Mr. Sharp in his _Life of Browning_ records some words uttered by Mr. Browning a week or two before his death, which show how permanent was his sense of indebtedness to his father. "It would have been quite unpardonable in my case," he said, "not to have done my best. My dear father put me in a condition most favorable for the best work I was capable of. When I think of the many authors who have had to fight their way through all sorts of difficulties, I have no reason to be proud of my achievements.... He secured for me all the care and comfort that a literary man needs to do good work. It would have been shameful if I had not done my best to realize his expectations of me."

After it was determined that Robert should "commence poet," he and his father came to the conclusion that a university training had many elements foreign to the aim the youth had set before him, and that a richer and more directly available preparation could be gained from "sedulous cultivation of the powers of his mind" at home, and from "seeing life in the best sense" at home and abroad. Mrs. Orr tells us that the first qualifying step of the zealous young poet was to read and digest the whole of Dr. Johnson's _Dictionary_.

Browning's first published poem, _Pauline_, appeared anonymously in January, 1833, when he was twenty years old. This poem is of especial autobiographical interest. Its enthusiastic praise of Sh.e.l.ley recalls his early devotion to that poet, and in many scattered pa.s.sages we find references to his own personality or experiences. The following lines show with what intensity he recreated the lives and scenes in the books he read:

And I myself went with the tale--a G.o.d Wandering after beauty, or a giant Standing vast in the sunset--an old hunter Talking with G.o.ds, or a high-crested chief Sailing with troops of friends to Tenedos.

I tell you, naught has ever been so clear As the place, the time, the fas.h.i.+on of those lives: I had not seen a work of lofty art, Nor woman's beauty, nor sweet nature's face, Yet, I say, never morn broke clear as those On the dim cl.u.s.tered isles in the blue sea, The deep groves and white temples and wet caves; And nothing ever will surprise me now-- Who stood beside the naked Swift-footed, Who bound my forehead with Proserpine's hair.

There is true and powerful self-a.n.a.lysis in the lines beginning:

I am made up of an intensest life;

and the invocation in lines 811-854 reveals the pa.s.sionately religious nature of the young poet. In _The Early Writings of Robert Browning_[1]

Mr. Gosse gives an account of the impression made by this poem upon men so diverse as the Rev. William Johnson Fox, John Stuart Mill, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, to all of whom, in spite of its crudities and very evident immaturity, it seemed a production of exceptional promise.

After an interval of two years Browning published, this time under his own name, a second long poem. The subject, Paracelsus, had been suggested by the friend, Amedee de Ripert-Monclar, to whom the poem is dedicated. In pursuance of his purposed rehabilitation of a vanished age Browning made extensive researches in the British Museum into the history of Paracelsus, the great leader in sixteenth century medical science; but in the poem the facts are subordinated to a minute a.n.a.lysis of the spiritual history of Paracelsus. The poem was too abstruse in subject and style to bring Browning popularity, but his genius was recognized by important critics, and, though he was but twenty-three, he was admitted into the foremost literary circles of London. One of his most distinguished new friends was Mr. Macready, the great actor. It was at his house that Browning first met Mr. Forster, who had already written favorable critiques of _Paracelsus_, one for _The Examiner_ and one for _The New Monthly Magazine_. Other literary a.s.sociates of this period were Leigh Hunt, Barry Cornwall, Sergeant Talfourd, d.i.c.kens, and Walter Savage Landor. There were not infrequent dinners and suppers to which the young poet was welcomed. He is described as being at this period singularly handsome. "He looks and acts," said Mr. Macready, "more like a youthful poet than any man I ever saw." He had sculpturesque ma.s.ses of dark wavy hair, a skin like delicate ivory, deep-set, expressive eyes, and a sensitive mouth. He was slender, graceful, and most attractive in manner, and he was something of a dandy in his attention to dress. He is said to have made an especially good impression on one occasion when the circ.u.mstances must have been as trying as they were exhilarating. In May, 1836, a group of poets had a.s.sembled at Mr. Talfourd's to celebrate Macready's successful production of Talfourd's _Ion_. Browning sat opposite Macready, who was between Wordsworth and Landor. When Talfourd proposed a toast, "The Poets of England," he spoke in complimentary terms of Wordsworth and Landor, but called for a response from "the youngest of the Poets of England, the author of _Paracelsus_." Landor raised his cup to the young man, and Wordsworth shook hands with him across the table, saying, "I am proud to know you, Mr. Browning."

Browning's third literary venture was a tragedy, _Strafford_, dedicated to Macready, at whose request it was written. The drama presents the impeachment, condemnation, and execution of the Earl of Strafford, a statesman who, according to the play, loved the unworthy King Charles the First and sacrificed everything, even to life itself, in his blind loyalty to a master who treacherously deserted him in the hour of need.

It was a topic to which Browning had already given much thought, for he had the preceding year completed, from materials supplied by Mr. John Forster, a _Life of Strafford_ begun by Forster for Lardner's _Eminent British Statesmen_.[2] The question of the historic truthfulness of the drama is discussed by the historian Gardiner in the Introduction to Miss Emily H. Hickey's edition of _Strafford_. He shows that the play is in its details and "even in the very roots of the situation" untrue to fact, and yet he maintains that in the chief characters there is essential truth of conception. "Every time that I read the play," says Gardiner, "I feel more certain that Browning has seized the real Strafford ... Charles, too, with his faults, perhaps exaggerated, is nevertheless the real Charles." The play was produced at Covent Garden Theater in May, 1837, with Macready as Strafford and Miss Helen Faucit as Lady Carlisle, and was successful in spite of poor scenery and costuming and poor acting in some of the parts. But owing to the financial condition of the theater and the consequent withdrawal of one of the important actors after the fifth night, the play had but a brief run. It was presented again in 1886 under the auspices of the Browning Society, and its power as an acting play "surprised and impressed" the audience.

Before the composition of _Strafford_ Browning had begun a long poem, _Sordello_, which he completed after his first visit to Italy in 1838, and published in 1840. No one of his poems is more difficult to read, and many are the stories told of the dismay occasioned by its various perplexities. The effect of this poem on Browning's fame was disastrous.

In fact, after _Sordello_ there began a period, twenty years long, of almost complete indifference in England to Browning's work. The enthusiasm over the promise of his early poems died quite away. Late in life Mr. Browning commented on this period of his literary career as a time of "prolonged desolateness." Yet the years 1841-1846 are the years in which he attained his poetic maturity, and years in which he did some of his best work. During this period he brought out the series somewhat fancifully called _Bells and Pomegranates_. The phrase itself comes from _Exodus_ xxviii, 33, 34. As a t.i.tle Browning explained it to mean "something like a mixture of music with discoursing, sound with sense, poetry with thought." This cheap serial edition, the separate numbers of which sold at first at sixpence and later at half a crown, included _Pippa Pa.s.ses_, _King Victor and King Charles_, _Dramatic Lyrics_, _The Return of the Druses_, _A Blot in the 'Scutcheon_, _Colombe's Birthday_, _Dramatic Romances and Lyrics_, _Luria_, and _A Soul's Tragedy_.

All of Browning's plays except _Strafford_ and _In a Balcony_ came out of this series. The most beautiful of them all, _Pippa Pa.s.ses_, appeared in 1841. It is hardly a drama at all in the conventional sense, though it has one scene, that between Ottima and Sebald, of the highest dramatic power; but it has always been a favorite with readers. When it was published Miss Barrett wrote to Mr. Browning that she found it in her heart to covet the authors.h.i.+p of this poem more than any other of his works, and he said in answer that he, too, liked _Pippa_ better than anything else he had yet done. Mr. Sharp, while emphasizing the undramatic quality of the play, counts it "the most imperishable because the most nearly immaculate of Browning's dramatic poems." "It seems to me," he adds, "like all simple and beautiful things, profound enough for the sinking plummet of the most curious explorer of the depths of life. It can be read, re-read, learned by heart, and the more it is known the wider and more alluring are the avenues of imaginative thought which it discloses. It has, more than any other long composition by its author, that quality of symmetry, that _symmetria prisca_ recorded of Leonardo da Vinci in the Latin epitaph of Platino Piatto; and, as might be expected, its mental basis, what Rossetti called fundamental brain work, is as luminous, depth within depth, as the morning air....

Everyone who knows Browning at all knows _Pippa Pa.s.ses_."

Of the seven dramas published in _Bells and Pomegranates_ there is comparatively little stage history to record. In spite of occasional fairly successful productions it must be admitted that Browning's plays have never achieved, probably never will achieve, popularity in the shape of long runs in many cities.[3] They are too subjective, too a.n.a.lytic, too psychological, for quick or easy understanding. But to the reader they offer many delights. The stories are clear, coherent, interesting; the characters strongly individualized; the crises of experience stimulating; the interaction of personalities subtly a.n.a.lyzed; the poetry n.o.ble and beautiful.

The two non-dramatic numbers of _Bells and Pomegranates_ were _Dramatic Lyrics_ (No. 3, 1842) and _Dramatic Romances and Lyrics_ (No. 7, 1845).

The first included such poems as "Cavalier Tunes," "In a Gondola,"

"Porphyria," and "The Pied Piper of Hamelin"; the second included "How they Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix," "The Lost Leader," "The Tomb at St. Praxed's," "The Flight of the d.u.c.h.ess," "The Boy and the Angel," and the first part of "Saul." These poems, together with the dramas, make a remarkably rich body of poetry to be produced in the short s.p.a.ce of five years. And the character of the work, its variety and beauty and strength and originality, were such that its meager and grudging acceptance seems now inexplicable.

The most important event in the life of Browning during this period was his acquaintance with Miss Elizabeth Barrett. In 1844 she brought out a new volume of poems which he saw and greatly admired. He wrote to her expressing delight in her work and asking permission to call; but Miss Barrett, owing to long-continued invalidism, had lived in almost entire seclusion, and she was not at first willing to receive Mr. Browning.

This was in January, 1845, and many letters pa.s.sed between them before the first interview in the following May. Mr. Browning's love for Miss Barrett found almost immediate expression and she was soon conscious of an equally strong love for him, but for a considerable time she persistently refused to marry him. To her mind the obstacles were almost insurmountable. Of these her ill-health was chief. She could not consent, she said, to dim the prosperities of his career by a union with her future, which she characterized as a precarious thing, a thing for making burdens out of--but not for his carrying. In exchange for the "n.o.ble extravagancies" of his love she could bring him only "anxiety and more sadness than he was born to." This obstacle of ill-health was unexpectedly modified by a very mild winter and by the new physical vigor brought in the train of new happiness. From this point of view the marriage, though hazardous, was practicable by the end of the summer of 1846. A second obstacle lay in the nature and opinions of Miss Barrett's father, who governed even his grown-up children by "an incredible system of patriarchal absolutism." By what was variously termed an obliquity of the will, an eccentricity, a monomania, he had decided that none of his children should marry, and on this point he demanded "pa.s.sive obedience." It was perfectly clear that Miss Barrett could not gain his consent to her marriage, and so, after long hesitation and much unhappiness, she decided to marry Mr. Browning without that consent. In order to save her family and close friends from the blame sure to fall upon them for the remotest sanction of her marriage, her plans were kept an absolute secret. She met Mr. Browning at Marylebone Church on September 12, 1846, and they were married there, Mrs. Browning returning at once to her own home, where she remained till a week later, when she started for Italy with her husband. The wedding was then announced.

Throughout her father's life Mrs. Browning endeavored to placate him, for she devotedly loved him and she had been his favorite child, but in vain. He would never see her again, he returned her letters unopened, and he would not allow her to be spoken of in his presence.

After resting a week in Paris Mr. and Mrs. Browning went on to Pisa, where they remained nearly seven months. The "miracle" of the Pisa life was Mrs. Browning's gain in health. "You are not _improved_, you are _transformed_," was Mrs. Jameson's exclamation. It was at Pisa that Mr.

Browning came to know of the sonnets his wife had written during the progress of their courts.h.i.+p and engagement. In _Critical Kit-Kats_ (1896) Mr. Gosse tells the story as Mr. Browning gave it to him: "One day, early in 1847, their breakfast being over, Mrs. Browning went upstairs, while her husband stood at the window watching the street till the table could be cleared. He was presently aware of someone behind him, although the servant had gone. It was Mrs. Browning who held him by the shoulder to prevent his turning to look at her, and at the same time pushed a packet of papers into the pocket of his coat. She told him to read that and to tear it up if he did not like it; and then she fled again to her room." Mr. Browning felt at once that he had no right to keep such poetry as a private possession. "I dared not," he said, "reserve to myself the finest sonnets written in any language since Shakespeare's." They were accordingly published in 1850, under the intentionally mystifying t.i.tle, _Sonnets from the Portuguese_.

The Brownings reached Florence April 20, 1847. After several changes they were, in May, 1848, established in the home in which they remained during Mrs. Browning's life. It was a suite of rooms on the second floor of the Palazzo Guidi. Of the practical side of this early Florentine life, Mrs. Browning wrote, "My dear brothers have the illusion that n.o.body should marry on less than two thousand a year. Good heavens! how preposterous it does seem to me! We scarcely spend three hundred, and I have every luxury I ever had, and which it would be so easy to give up, at need; and Robert wouldn't sleep, I think, if an unpaid bill dragged itself by any chance into another week. He says that when people get into pecuniary difficulties his sympathies always go with the butchers and the bakers." In accordance with this horror of owing five s.h.i.+llings five days, the furnis.h.i.+ngs of the new home, "the rococo chairs, spring sofas, carved bookcases, satin from cardinals' beds, and the rest," were acc.u.mulated at a pace dictated by the bank account, but for all that it was not long before the rooms began to take on an aspect as beautiful as it was homelike.

By preference the Brownings lived very quietly. At the end of fifteen months Mrs. Browning wrote, "Robert has not been out an evening of the fifteen months; but what with music and books and writing and talking, we scarcely know how the days go, it's such a gallop on the gra.s.s."

March 9, 1849, was born Wiedemann, later known as "Penini" or "Pen"

Browning. Coincident with this joy was the grief caused by the death of Browning's mother, a sorrow from which he rallied but slowly. The Florentine life was occasionally varied by summers at Bagni di Lucca, winters in Paris or Rome, and several visits to England. There was also an increasing social life. Americans were especially welcome to the Brownings because, while England was still indifferent to Browning's work, America had given it an appreciative welcome. In March, 1861, Mrs.

Browning wrote, "I don't complain for myself of an unappreciative public. _I have no reason_. But just for _that_ reason I complain more about Robert.... In America he is a power, a writer, a poet--he is read, he lives in the hearts of the people."[4]

Among the Americans a.s.sociated with the Brownings for longer or shorter periods during their life in Florence were two distinguished women, Margaret Fuller Ossoli and Harriet Beecher Stowe. In 1847, George William Curtis spent two days with the Brownings at Vallombrosa, a visit later described in his _Easy Chair_. Mr. Field, who had brought out the American reprint of the two-volume edition of Browning's poems in 1849, was a guest at Casa Guidi in 1852. Charles Sumner writes of "delicious Tuscan evenings" with the Brownings and the Storys in 1859. Mr.

Browning's interests in art led to friends.h.i.+ps with American artists, among whom were Mr. Page, who painted a successful portrait of Browning; Miss Harriet Hosmer, to whom Mr. and Mrs. Browning finally consented to sit for the "Clasped Hands"; and Hiram Powers. The dearest American friends were, however, Mr. and Mrs. Hawthorne and Mr. and Mrs. Story.

Music and art were among Browning's chief delights in Florence. George William Curtis in describing the trip to Vallombrosa says that it was part of their pleasure to sit in the dusky convent chapel while Browning at the organ "chased a fugue of Master Hughes of Saxe Gotha, or dreamed out upon twilight keys a faint throbbing toccata of Galuppi's." Modeling in clay was even more satisfying as a personal resource. In the autumn of 1860 Mrs. Browning wrote, "Robert has taken to modeling under Mr.

Story (at his studio) and is making extraordinary progress, turning to account his studies in anatomy. He has copied already two busts, the young Augustus and the Psyche, and is engaged on another, enchanted with his new trade, working six hours a day." Some months later she added, "The modeling combines body-work and soul-work, and the more tired he has been, and the more his back ached, poor fellow, the more he has exulted and been happy--'_no, nothing ever made him so happy before_.'"

He found, also, an unfailing pleasure in the study of great pictures.

And he was a buyer of pictures with a collector's delight in hunting out the work of the unappreciated early Tuscan artists. Mrs. Orr says that he owned at least one picture by each of the obscure artists mentioned in "Old Pictures in Florence."

Mrs. Browning sometimes expressed regret that Browning should give himself so unreservedly in so many directions, because she felt that he had thus too little time and energy left for poetry. Her fear was not without justification, for after the richly productive period from 1841 to 1846, we come upon a s.p.a.ce of nine years the only publications of which are, in 1850, _Christmas Eve and Easter Day_, a long poem in two parts giving the arguments in favor of Christianity; and, in 1852, an introduction to a collection of letters then supposed to be by Sh.e.l.ley, but since found to be spurious. The essay is nevertheless of importance as an exposition of Browning's theory of poetry, and as an interesting study of Sh.e.l.ley.

In 1855, at the close of this period of nine years, there appeared a collection of fifty-one poems ent.i.tled _Men and Women_. In "fundamental brain power," insight, beauty, and mastery of style, these poems show Browning at the highest level of his poetic achievement. It is in these remarkable poems that he brought to perfection a poetic form which he practically invented, the dramatic monologue, a form in which there is but one speaker but which is essentially dramatic in effect. The dramatic quality arises partly from the implied presence of listeners whose expressions of a.s.sent or dissent determine the progress or the abrupt changes of direction of the speaker's words. In "Andrea del Sarto," for example, Lucrezia's smiles and frowns and gestures of impatience are a constant influence, and the poem presents as vivid an interplay of personalities as any scene in a drama. But the implied listener is hardly more than a secondary dramatic element, the chief one being that the speaker talks, as do the characters in a play, out of the demands of the immediate experience, gradually and casually disclosing all the tangled web of influence, all the clashes of will with destiny, of desire with convention, that have led to the crisis depicted. Fra Lippo Lippi gives no consecutive history of his life, only such s.n.a.t.c.hes of it as partially account for his present mad freak, but the strife between his own nature and instinct on the one hand and the conventions and traditions of religious art on the other could hardly be more vividly presented. _In a Balcony_, the one drama in _Men and Women_, has but a fragment of a plot, but in intensity, reality, and pa.s.sion it excels most of Browning's dramas, and, in spite of its long speeches, has proved effective on the stage.[5] In variety of theme, subject-matter, and verse-form, the poems of _Men and Women_ defy cla.s.sification. Whatever page one turns, there is something novel, stimulating, captivating. All of Browning's Florentine interests are represented here--his love of old pictures and little-known music, his delight in Florence, Venice, Rome, in all Italy, her skies and her landscapes, the vagrants of her streets, her religious ceremonies, her church dignitaries, her scholars. Then there are love-poems in all tones and tempers, the n.o.blest of them all, "One Word More," being Browning's most direct and personal tribute to his wife. And we see in its keenest form his intellectual delight in subtle disquisition. The doctrine of immortality as it appeals to the mind of the cultured, dissatisfied pagan Cleon; the miracle of Lazarus as it is brooded over by the Arab physician Kars.h.i.+sh; the balancing of faith and doubt in the clever casuistry of Bishop Blougram--these are topics to Browning's taste and are treated with skill and mastery. Taken all in all these poems give to the reader a full impression of Browning's characteristic force, the darting, penetrating power of his phrase, the rush and energy and leap of his thought. It is by _Men and Women_, the somewhat similar _Dramatis Personae_, and the earlier _Dramatic Lyrics_ and _Dramatic Romances_, that Browning is most widely and most favorably known.

During the first ten years that the Brownings were in Florence Mrs.

Browning's health was so good that she was able to enjoy social and outdoor pleasures to a degree that would have been thought impossible before her marriage. She had also kept up her literary work. A new edition of her poems appeared in 1849; in 1851 she published _Casa Guidi Windows_, poems ill.u.s.trative of her ardent interest in all that pertained to the fight for Italian freedom; and in 1856 her long-planned verse novel _Aurora Leigh_ was completed and published. But soon after this her strength began insensibly to fail and during the last three years of her life she suffered much from repeated bronchial attacks.

However, her death, in June, 1861, was entirely unexpected. The Florentines had loved her deeply and had appreciated her utterances in behalf of a free Italy. She was, accordingly, buried in Florence, with "extraordinary demonstrations of respect," and the house where she had lived was marked by the munic.i.p.ality with a commemorative tablet.

Browning's wish was to leave Florence at once and to make the new life as unlike the old as possible. He went to London, and after some delay established himself in a house at Warwick Crescent, where he lived till 1887. The first portion of his life in England was one of "unbearable loneliness." He took care of his son, busied himself with a new edition of his wife's poems, read and studied and wrote with feverish intensity, and avoided people. But with the spring of 1863, says Mr. Gosse, "a great change came over Browning's habits. He had shunned all invitations into society, but ... it suddenly occurred to him that this mode of life was morbid and unworthy," and thereupon he entered into the social, literary, musical, and artistic life of London.

The nine years following 1855 were again a period of small productivity.

_Dramatis Personae_ was a slender volume to represent so many years, even though it contained such great poems as "Rabbi Ben Ezra," "A Death in the Desert," and "Abt Vogler." But during this period a long poem, _The Ring and the Book_, had been maturing. In 1860, while still at Casa Guidi, Browning had found at a book-stall the now famous "square old yellow Book," containing the legal record of a famous Roman murder case.

He read the account on the way home, and before night had so mastered the details that, as he paced up and down on the terrace in the darkness, he saw the tragedy unfold before him in picture after picture.

It was not, however, till 1864 that he definitely set to work on the composition of the poem. It was published in four volumes of three parts each, in the winter and spring of 1868-9. The poem has a novel structure. The story is retold ten times by different persons and with such variations of fact and opinions and style as are dictated by the knowledge and the character of the speaker. The monologues of Count Guido, who murdered his wife, of Pompilia the young wife, of Caponsacchi the "soldier saint" who endeavored to save her, and of the old Pope, are by far the most interesting portions of the poem, but the whole of it is remarkable, and it justly takes rank as one of England's greatest poems.

With the appearance of this book Browning's genius received adequate recognition in high places. _The Athenaeum_ called it "the _opus magnum_ of the generation, not merely beyond all parallel the supremest poetic achievement of the time, but the most precious and profound spiritual treasure that England has possessed since the days of Shakespeare."