Robert Browning Part 6

the pig-of-lead-like pressure Of the preaching man's immense stupidity.

The pastor, whose words so sway his enraptured flock, mangles the Holy Scriptures with a fine irreverence, and pours forth his doctrine with an entirely self-satisfied indifference to reason and common sense. Nor has love accomplished its perfect work, for the interloper who stands at the entry is eyed with inquisitorial glances of pious exclusiveness--how has a Gallio such as he ventured to take his station among the elect?

Matthew Arnold, had he visited Mount Zion, might have discoursed with a charmingly insolent urbanity on the genius for ugliness in English dissent, and the supreme need of bringing a current of new ideas to play upon the unintelligent use of its traditional formulae. And Matthew Arnold would have been right. These are the precise subjects of Browning's somewhat rough-and-ready satire. But Browning adds that in Mount Zion, love, at least in its rudiments, is present, and where love is, there is Christ.

Of English nonconformity in its humblest forms Browning can write, as it were, from within; he writes of Roman Catholic forms of wors.h.i.+p as one who stands outside; his sympathy with the prostrate mult.i.tude in St.

Peter's at Rome is of an impersonal kind, founded rather upon the recognition of an objective fact than springing from an instinctive feeling. For a moment he is carried away by the tide of their devout enthusiasms; but he recovers himself to find indeed that love is also here and therefore Christ is present, but the wors.h.i.+ppers fallen under "Rome's gross yoke," are very infants in their need of these sacred buffooneries and posturings and petticoatings; infants

Peevish as ever to be suckled, Lulled with the same old baby-prattle With intermixture of the rattle.

And this, though the time has come when love would have them no longer infantile, but capable of standing and walking, "not to speak of trying to climb." Such a short and easy method of dealing with Roman Catholic dogma and ritual cannot be commended for its intelligence; it is quite possible to be on the same side as Browning without being as crude as he in misconception. He does not seriously consider the Catholic idea which regards things of sense as made luminous by the spirit of which they are the envoys and the ministers. It is enough for him to declare his own creed which treats any intermediary between the human soul and the Divine as an obstruction or a veil:

My heart does best to receive in meekness That mode of wors.h.i.+p, as most to his mind, Where earthly aids being left behind, His All in All appears serene With the thinnest human veil between, Letting the mystic lamps, the seven, The many motions of his spirit, Pa.s.s as they list to earth from heaven.

This was the creed of Milton and of Bunyan; and yet with both Milton and Bunyan the imagery of the senses is employed as the means not of concealing but revealing the things of the spirit.

From the lecture-room of Gottingen, with its destructive and reconstructive criticism, Browning is even farther removed than he is from the ritualisms of the Roman basilica. Yet no caricature can be more amiable than his drawing of the learned Professor, so gentle in his aspect, so formidable in his conclusions, who, gazing into the air with a pure abstracted look, proceeds in a grave sweet voice to exhibit and a.n.a.lyse the sources of the myth of Christ. In the Professor's lecture-room Browning finds intellect indeed but only the shadow of love. He argues that if the "myth" of Christ be dissolved, the authority of Christ as a teacher disappears; Christ is even inferior to other moralists by virtue of the fact that He made personal claims which cannot be sustained. And whatever may be Christ's merit as a teacher of the truth, the motive to action which His life and words supplied must cease to exist if it be shown that the divine sacrifice of G.o.d manifest in the flesh is no more than a figment of the devout imagination. At every point the criticism of Browning is as far apart as it is possible to conceive from the criticism set forth in the later writings of Matthew Arnold. The one writer regards the "myth" as no more than the grave-clothes of a risen Christ whose essential virtue lies in his sweet reasonableness and his morality touched with enthusiasm. The other believes that if the wonderful story of love be proved a fable, a profound alteration--and an alteration for the worse--has been made in the religious consciousness of Christendom. And undoubtedly the difference between the supernatural and the natural theories of Christianity is far greater than Arnold represented it to be. But Browning at this date very inadequately conceived the power of Christ as a revealer of the fatherhood of G.o.d. In that revelation, whether the Son of G.o.d was human or divine, lay a truth of surpa.s.sing power, and a motive of action capable of summoning forth the purest and highest energies of the soul. That such is the case has been abundantly evidenced by the facts of history. Browning finds only much learning and the ghost of dead love in the Gottingen lecture-room; and of course it was easy to adapt his Professor's lecture so as to arrive at this conclusion. But the process and the conclusion are alike unjust.

Having traversed the various forms of Christian faith and scepticism, the speaker in _Christmas Eve_ declines into a mood of lazy benevolence and mild indifferentism towards each and all of these. Has not Christ been present alike at the holding-forth of the poor dissenting son of thunder, who tore G.o.d's word into shreds, at the tinklings and posturings and incense-fumes of Roman pietism, and even at the learned discourse which dissolved the myth of his own life and death? Why, then, over-strenuously take a side? Why not regard all phases of belief or no-belief with equal and serene regard? Such a mood of amiable indifferentism is abhorrent to Browning's feelings. The hem of Christ's robe pa.s.ses wholly at this point from the hand of the seer of visions in his poem. One best way of wors.h.i.+p there needs must be; ours may indeed not be the absolutely best, but it is our part, it is our probation to see that we strive earnestly after what is best; yes, and strive with might and main to confer upon our fellows the gains which we have found.

It may be G.o.d's part--we trust it is--to bring all wanderers to the one fold at last. As for us, we must seek after Him and find Him in the mode required by our highest thought, our purest pa.s.sion. Here Browning speaks from his central feeling. Only, we may ask, what if one's truest self lie somewhere hidden amid a thousand hesitating sympathies? And is not the world s.p.a.cious enough to include a Montaigne as well as a Pascal or a Browning? a.s.suredly the world without its Montaigne would be a poorer and a less hospitable dwelling-place for the spirits of men.

Mrs Browning complained to her husband of what she terms the asceticism of _Easter Day_, the second part of his volume of 1850; his reply was that it stated "one side of the question." "Don't think," Mrs Browning says, "that he has taken to the cilix--indeed he has not--but it is his way to _see_ things as pa.s.sionately as other people _feel_ them."

_Easter Day_ has nothing to say of religious life in Churches and societies, nothing of the communities of public wors.h.i.+p. For the writer of this poem only three things exist--G.o.d, the individual soul, and the world regarded as the testing place and training place of the soul.

Browning has here a rigour of moral or spiritual earnestness which may be called, by any one who so pleases, Puritan in its kind and its intensity; he feels the need, if we are to attain any approximation to the Christian ideal, of the lit lamp and the girt loin. Two difficulties in the Christian life in particular he chooses to consider--first, the difficulty of faith in the things of the spirit, and especially in what he regards as the essential parts of the Christian story; and secondly, the difficulty of obeying the injunction to renounce the world. That we cannot grow to our highest attainment by the old method enjoined by pagan philosophy--that of living according to nature, he regards as evident, for nature itself is warped and marred; it groans and travails, and from its discords how shall we frame a harmony? It was always his habit of mind, he tells us, from his childhood onwards, to face a danger and confront a doubt, and if there were anywhere a lurking fear, to draw this forth from its hiding-place and examine it in the light, even at the risk of some mortal ill. Therefore he will press for an answer to his present questionings; he will try conclusions to the uttermost.

As to the initial difficulty of faith, Browning with a touch of scorn, a.s.sures us that evidences of spiritual realities, evidences of Christianity--as they are styled--external and internal will be readily found by him who desires to find; convincing enough they are for him who wants to be convinced. But in truth faith is a n.o.ble venture of the spirit, an aspiring effort towards what is best, even though what is best may never be attained. The mole gropes blindly in unquestionably solid clay; better be like the gra.s.shopper "that spends itself in leaps all day to reach the sun." A gra.s.shopper's leap sunwards--that is what we signify by this word "faith."

But the difficulties of the Christian life only s.h.i.+ft their place when faith by whatever means has been won. We are bidden to renounce the world: what does the injunction mean? in what way shall it be obeyed?

"Ascetic" Mrs Browning named this poem; and ascetic it is if by that word we understand the counselling and exhorting to a n.o.ble exercise and discipline; but Browning even in his poem by no means wears the cilix, and no teaching can be more fatal than his to asceticism in the narrower sense of the word. To renounce the world, if interpreted aright, is to extinguish or suppress no faculty that has been given to man, but rather to put each faculty to its highest uses:

"Renounce the world!"--Ah, were it done By merely cutting one by one Your limbs off, with your wise head last, How easy were it!--how soon past, If once in the believing mood.

The harder and the higher renunciation is this--to choose the things of the spirit rather than the things of sense, and again in accepting, as means of our earthly discipline and development, the things of sense to press through these to the things of the spirit which lie behind and beyond and above them.

Such, and such alone, is the asceticism to which Browning summons his disciple; it is the asceticism of energy not that of atrophy; it does not starve the senses, but reinforces the spirit; it results not in a cloistered but a militant virtue. A certain self-denial it may demand, but the self-denial becomes the condition of a higher joy. And if life with its trials frays the flesh, what matters it when the light of the spirit s.h.i.+nes through with only a fuller potency? In the choice between sense and spirit, or, to put it more generally, in the choice between what is higher and less high, lies the probation of a soul, and also its means of growth. And what is the meaning of this mortal life--this strange phenomenon otherwise so unintelligible--if it be not the moment in which a soul is proved, the period in which a soul is shaped and developed for other lives to come?

To forget that Browning is a preacher may suit a dainty kind of criticism which detaches the idea of beauty from the total of our humanity addressed by the greater artists. But the solemn thoughts that are taken up by beauty in such work, for example, as that of Michael Angelo, are an essential element or an essential condition of its peculiar character as a thing of beauty. And armour, we know, may be as lovely to the mere senses as a flower. Browning's doctrine may sometimes protrude gauntly through his poetry; but at his best--as in _Rabbi ben Ezra_ or _Abt Vogler_--the thought of the poem is needful in the dance of lyrical enthusiasm, as the male partner who takes hands with beauty, and to separate them would bring the dance to a sudden close. Both are present in _Easter Day_, and we must watch the movement of the two. In a pa.s.sage already quoted from _Christmas Eve_ the face of Christ is n.o.bly imagined as the sun which bleaches a discoloured web. Here the poet's imagination is as intense in its presentation of Christ the doomsman:

He stood there. Like the smoke Pillared o'er Sodom, when day broke-- I saw Him. One magnific pall Mantled in ma.s.sive fold and fall His head, and coiled in snaky swathes About His feet; night's black, that bathes All else, broke, grizzled with despair, Against the soul of blackness there.

A gesture told the mood within-- That wrapped right hand which based the chin,-- That intense meditation fixed On His procedure,--pity mixed With the fulfilment of decree.

Motionless thus, He spoke to me, Who fell before His feet, a ma.s.s, No man now.

The picture of the final conflagration of the Judgment Day is perhaps over-laboured, a descriptive _tour de force_, horror piled upon horror with acc.u.mulative power,--a picture somewhat too much in the manner of Martin; and the verse does not lend itself to the sustained sublimity of terror. The glow of Milton's h.e.l.l is intenser, and Milton's majestic instrumentation alone could render the voices of its flames. The real awfulness of Browning's Judgment Day dwells wholly in the inner experiences of a solitary soul. The speaker finds of a sudden that the doom is upon him, and that in the probation of life his choice was earth, not heaven. The sentence p.r.o.nounced upon him is in accordance with the election of his own will--let earth, with all its beauty of nature, all its gifts of human art, all its successes of the intellect, as he had conceived and chosen them, be his. To his despair, he finds that what he had prized in life, and what is now granted to him cannot bring him happiness or even content. The plenitude of beauty, of which all partial beauty was but a pledge, is forever lost to him. The glory of art, which lay beyond its poor actual attainments, is lost. The joy of knowledge, with all those

grasps of guess Which pull the more into the less,

is lost. And as to earth's best possession--love--had he ever made a discovery through human love of that which it forthshadows--the love that is perfect and divine? Earth is no longer earth to the doomed man, but the star of the G.o.d Rephan of which we read in one of Browning's latest poems; in the horror of its blank and pa.s.sionless uniformity, untroubled by any spiritual presences, he cowers at the Judge's feet, and prays for darkness, hunger, toil, distress, if only hope be also granted him:

Then did the form expand, expand-- knew Him through the dread disguise As the whole G.o.d within his eyes Embraced me.

The Doomsman has in a moment become the Saviour. In all this, if Browning has the burden of a prophecy to utter, he utters it, after the manner of earlier prophets, as a vision. His art is sensuous and pa.s.sionate; his argument is transformed into a series of imaginative experiences.

Mrs. Browning's illness during the summer and early autumn of 1850 left her for a time more shaken in health than she had been since her marriage. But by the spring of the following year she had recovered strength; and designs of travel were formed, which should include Rome, North Italy, Switzerland, the Rhine, Brussels, Paris and London. Almost at the moment of starting for Rome at the end of April, the plans were altered; the season was too far advanced for going south; ways and means must be economised; Rome might be postponed for a future visit; and Venice would make amends for the present sacrifice. And Venice in May and early June did indeed for a time make amends. "I have been between heaven and earth," Mrs. Browning wrote, "since our arrival at Venice."

The rich architecture, the colour, the moonlight, the music, the enchanting silence made up a unity of pleasures like nothing that she had previously known. When evening came she and her husband would follow the opera from their box hired for "two s.h.i.+llings and eightpence English," or sit under the moon in the piazza of St Mark sipping coffee and reading the French papers. But as the month went by, Browning lost appet.i.te and lost sleep. The "soothing, lulling, rocking atmosphere"

which suited Mrs. Browning made him, after the first excitement of delight, grow nervous and dispirited. They hastened away to Padua, drove to Arqua, "for Petrarch's sake," pa.s.sed through Brescia in a flood of white moonlight, and having reached Milan climbed--the invalid of Wimpole Street and her husband--to the topmost point of the cathedral.

From the Italian lakes they crossed by the St Gothard to Switzerland, and omitting part of their original scheme of wandering, journeyed in twenty-four hours without stopping from Strasburg to Paris.

In Paris they loitered for three weeks. Mrs. Browning during the short visit which followed her marriage had hardly seen the city. Bright shop-windows, before which little Wiedemann would scream with pleasure, restaurants and dinners _a la carte_, full-foliaged trees and gardens in the heart of the town were a not unwelcome exchange for Italian church-interiors and altar-pieces. Even "disreputable prints and fascinating hats and caps" were appreciated as proper to the genius of the place, and the writer of _Casa Guidi Windows_ had the happiness of seeing her hero, M. le President, "in a c.o.c.ked hat, and with a train of cavalry, pa.s.sing like a rocket along the boulevards to an occasional yell from the Red." By a happy chance they lighted in Paris upon Tennyson, now Poet-laureate, whom Mrs. Browning had hitherto known only through his poems; he was in the friendliest mood, and urged that they should make use of his house and servants during their stay in England, an offer which was not refused, though there was no intention of actually taking advantage of the kindness. As for England, the thought of it, with her father's heart and her father's door closed against her, was bitter as wormwood to Mrs. Browning. "It's only Robert," she wrote, "who is a patriot now, of us two."

English soil as they stepped ash.o.r.e was a puddle, and English air a fog. London lodgings were taken at 26 Devons.h.i.+re Street, and, although Mrs. Browning suffered from the climate, they were soon dizzied and dazzled by the whirl of pleasant hospitalities. An evening with Carlyle ("one of the greatest sights in England"), a dinner given by Forster at Thames Ditton, "in sight of the swans," a breakfast with Rogers, daily visits of Barry Cornwall, cordial companions.h.i.+p of Mrs. Jameson, a performance by the Literary Guild actors, a reading of _Hamlet_ by f.a.n.n.y Kemble--with these distractions and such as these the two months flew quickly. It was in some ways a relief when Pen's faithful maid Wilson went for a fortnight to see her kinsfolk, and Mrs. Browning had to take her place and subst.i.tute for social racketing domestic cares. The one central sorrow remained and in some respects was intensified. She had written to her father, and Browning himself wrote--"a manly, true, straight-forward letter," she informs a friend, "... everywhere generous and conciliating." A violent and unsparing reply was made, and with it came all the letters that his undutiful daughter had written to Mr.

Barrett; not one had been read or opened. He returned them now, because he had not previously known how he could be relieved of the obnoxious doc.u.ments. "G.o.d takes it all into his own hands," wrote Mrs. Browning, "and I wait." Something, however, was gained; her brothers were reconciled; Arabella Barrett was constant in kindness; and Henrietta journeyed from Taunton to London to enjoy a week in her company.

It was at Devons.h.i.+re Street that Bayard Taylor, the distinguished American poet and critic, made the acquaintance of the Brownings, and the record of his visit gives a picture of Browning at the age of thirty-nine, so clearly and firmly drawn that it ought not to be omitted here: "In a small drawing-room on the first floor I met Browning, who received me with great cordiality. In his lively, cheerful manner, quick voice, and perfect self-possession, he made the impression of an American rather than an Englishman. He was then, I should judge, about thirty-seven years of age, but his dark hair was already streaked with gray about the temples. His complexion was fair, with perhaps the faintest olive tinge, eyes large, clear, and gray, nose strong and well cut, mouth full and rather broad, and chin pointed, though not prominent. His forehead broadened rapidly upwards from the outer angle of the eyes, slightly retreating. The strong individuality which marks his poetry was expressed not only in his face and head, but in his whole demeanour. He was about the medium height, strong in the shoulders, but slender at the waist, and his movements expressed a combination of vigour and elasticity." Mrs Browning with her slight figure, pale face, shaded by chestnut curls, and grave eyes of bluish gray, is also described; and presently entered to the American visitor Pen, a blue-eyed, golden-haired boy, who babbled his little sentences in Italian.

When, towards the close of September, Browning and his wife left London for Paris, Carlyle by his own request was their companion on the journey. Mrs Browning feared that his irritable nerves would suffer from the vivacities of little Pen, but it was not so; he accepted with good humour the fact that the small boy had not yet learned, like his own Teufelsdrockh, the Eternal No: "Why, sir," exclaimed Carlyle, "you have as many aspirations as Napoleon!"[47] At Dieppe, Browning, as Carlyle records, "did everything, fought for us, and we--that is, the woman, the child and I--had only to wait and be silent." At Paris in the midst of "a crowding, jangling, vociferous tumult, the brave Browning fought for us, leaving me to sit beside the woman." An apartment was found on the sunny side of the Avenue des Champs-Elysees, "pretty, cheerful, carpeted rooms," far brighter and better than those of Devons.h.i.+re Street, and when, to Browning's amus.e.m.e.nt, his wife had moved every chair and table into the new and absolutely right position, they could rest and be thankful. Carlyle spent several evenings with them, and repaid the a.s.sistance which he received in various difficulties from Browning's command of the language, by picturesque conversations in his native speech: "You come to understand perfectly," wrote Mrs Browning, "when you know him, that his bitterness is only melancholy, and his scorn sensibility." A little later Browning's father and sister spent some weeks in Paris. Here, at all events, were perfect relations between the members of a family group; the daughter here was her father's comrade with something even of a maternal instinct; and the grandfather discovered to his great satisfaction that his own talent for drawing had descended to his grandchild.

The time was one when the surface of life in Paris showed an unruffled aspect; but under the surface were heavings of inward agitation. On the morning of December 2nd the great stroke against the Republic was delivered; the _coup d'etat_ was an accomplished fact. Later in the day Louis Napoleon rode under the windows of the apartment in the Avenue des Champs-Elysees, from the Carrousel to the Arc de l'etoile. To Mrs Browning it seemed the grandest of spectacles--"he rode there in the name of the people after all." She and her husband had witnessed revolutions in Florence, and political upheavals did not seem so very formidable. On the Thursday of bloodshed in the streets--December 4th--Pen was taken out for his usual walk, though not without certain precautions; as the day advanced the excitement grew tense, and when night fell the distant firing on the boulevards kept Mrs. Browning from her bed till one o'clock. On Sat.u.r.day they took a carriage and drove to see the field of action; the crowds moved to and fro, discussing the situation, but of real disturbance there was none; next day the theatres had their customary spectators and the Champs-Elysees its promenaders.

For the dishonoured "Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite," as Mrs. Browning heard it suggested, might now be inscribed "Infanterie, Cavallerie, Artillerie."

Such may have been her husband's opinion, but such was not hers. Her faith in the President had been now and again shaken; her faith in the Emperor became as time went on an enthusiasm of hero-wors.h.i.+p. The display of force on December 2nd impressed her imagination; there was a dramatic completeness in the whole performance; Napoleon represented the people; a democrat, she thought, should be logical and thorough; the vote of the millions entirely justified their chief. Browning viewed affairs more critically, more sceptically. "Robert and I," writes his wife jestingly, "have had some domestic _emeutes_, because he hates some imperial names." He detested all Buonapartes, he would say, past, present, and to come,--an outbreak explained by Mrs Browning to her satisfaction, as being only his self-willed way of dismissing a subject with which he refused to occupy his thoughts, a mere escapade of feeling and known to him as such. When all the logic and good sense were on the woman's side, how could she be disturbed by such masculine infirmities?

Though only a very little lower than the angels, he was after all that humorous being--a man.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 47: "Mrs Orr's Life and Letters of R.B.," 173.]

Chapter VIII

1851 to 1855

It was during the month of the _coup d'etat_ that Browning went back in thought to the poet of his youthful love, and wrote that essay which was prefixed to the volume of forged letters published as Sh.e.l.ley's by Moxon in 1852. The essay is interesting as Browning's only considerable piece of prose, and also as an utterance made not through the mask of any _dramatis persona_, but openly and directly from his own lips. Though not without value as a contribution to the study of Sh.e.l.ley's genius, it is perhaps chiefly of importance as an exposition of some of Browning's own views concerning his art. He distinguishes between two kinds or types of poet: the poet who like Shakespeare is primarily the "fas.h.i.+oner" of things independent of his own personality, artistic creations which embody some fact or reality, leaving it to others to interpret, as best they are able, its significance; and secondly the poet who is rather a "seer" than a fas.h.i.+oner, who attempts to exhibit in imaginative form his own conceptions of absolute truth, conceptions far from entire adequacy, yet struggling towards completeness; the poet who would shadow forth, as he himself apprehends them, _Ideas_, to use the word of Plato, "seeds of creation lying burningly on the Divine Hand"--which Ideas he discovers not so often in the external world as in his own soul, this being for him "the nearest reflex of the absolute Mind." What a poet of this second kind produces, as Browning finely states it, will be less a work than an effluence. He is attracted among external phenomena chiefly by those which summon forth his inner light and power, "he selects that silence of the earth and sea in which he can best hear the beating of his individual heart, and leaves the noisy, complex, yet imperfect exhibitions of nature in the manifold experience of man around him, which serve only to distract and suppress the working of his brain." To this latter cla.s.s of poets, although in _The Cenci_ and _Julian and Maddalo_ he is eminent as a "fas.h.i.+oner," Sh.e.l.ley conspicuously belongs. Mankind cannot wisely dispense with the services of either type of poet; at one time it chiefly needs to have that which is already known interpreted into its highest meanings; and at another, when the virtue of these interpretations has been appropriated and exhausted, it needs a fresh study and exploration of the facts of life and nature--for "the world is not to be learned and thrown aside, but reverted to and relearned." The truest and highest point of view from which to regard the poetry of Sh.e.l.ley is that which shows it as a "sublime fragmentary essay towards a presentment of the correspondency of the universe to Deity, of the natural to the spiritual, and of the actual to the ideal."

For Browning the poet of _Prometheus Unbound_ was not that beautiful and ineffectual angel of Matthew Arnold's fancy, beating in the void his luminous wings. A great moral purpose looked forth from Sh.e.l.ley's work, as it does, Browning would add, from all lofty works of art. And it may be remarked that the criticism of Browning's own writings which considers not only their artistic methods and artistic success or failure, but also their ethical and spiritual purport, is entirely in accord with his thoughts in this essay. Far from regarding Sh.e.l.ley as unpractical, he notes--and with perfect justice--"the peculiar practicalness" of Sh.e.l.ley's mind, which in his earlier years acted injuriously upon both his conduct and his art. His power to perceive the defects of society was accompanied by as precocious a fertility to contrive remedies; but his crudeness in theorising and his inexperience in practice resulted in not a few youthful errors. Gradually he left behind him "this low practical dexterity"; gradually he learnt that "the best way of removing abuses is to stand fast by truth. Truth is one, as they are manifold; and innumerable negative effects are produced by the upholding of one positive principle." Browning urges that Sh.e.l.ley, before the close, had pa.s.sed from his doctrinaire atheism to what was virtually a theistic faith. "I shall say what I think," he adds--"had Sh.e.l.ley lived he would have finally ranged himself with the Christians.... The preliminary step to following Christ is the leaving the dead to bury their dead." Perhaps this hypothetical antic.i.p.ation is to be cla.s.sed with the surmise of Cardinal Wiseman (if Father Prout rightly attributed to that eminent ecclesiastic a review of _Men and Women_ in _The Rambler_) that Browning himself would one day be found in the ranks of converts to Catholicism. In each case a wish was father to the thought; Browning recognised the fact that Sh.e.l.ley a.s.signed a place to love, side by side with power, among the forces which determine the life and development of humanity, and with Browning himself "power" was a synonym for the Divine will, and "love" was often an equivalent for G.o.d manifest in Jesus Christ. One or two other pa.s.sages of the essay may be noted as ill.u.s.trating certain characteristics of the writer's modes of thought and feeling: "Everywhere is apparent Sh.e.l.ley's belief in the existence of Good, to which Evil is an accident"--it is an optimist here, though of a subtler doctrine than Sh.e.l.ley's, who is applauding optimism. "Sh.e.l.ley was tender, though tenderness is not always the characteristic of very sincere natures; he was eminently both tender and sincere." Was Browning consulting his own heart, which was always sincere, and could be tender, but whose tenderness sometimes disappeared in explosions of indignant wrath? The principle, again, by which he determined an artist's rank is in harmony with Browning's general feeling that men are to be judged less by their actual achievements than by the possibilities that lie unfolded within them, and the ends to which they aspire, even though such ends be unattained: "In the hierarchy of creative minds, it is the presence of the highest faculty that gives first rank, in virtue of its kind, not degree; no pretension of a lower nature, whatever the completeness of development or variety of effect, impeding the precedency of the rarer endowment though only in the germ." And, last, of the tardy recognition of Sh.e.l.ley's genius as a poet, Browning wrote in words which though, as he himself says, he had always good praisers, no doubt express a thought that helped to sustain him against the indifference of the public to his poetry: "The misapprehensiveness of his age is exactly what a poet is sent to remedy: and the interval between his operation and the generally perceptible effect of it, is no greater, less indeed than in many other departments of the great human effort. The 'E pur si muove' of the astronomer was as bitter a word as any uttered before or since by a poet over his rejected living work, in that depth of conviction which is so like despair." The volume in which Browning's essay appeared was withdrawn from circulation on the discovery of the fraudulent nature of its contents. He had himself no opportunity of inspecting the forged ma.n.u.scripts, and no question of authenticity was raised until several copies of the book had pa.s.sed into circulation.[48]

During the nine months spent in Paris, from September 1851 to June 1852, Browning enlarged the circle of his friends and made some new and interesting acquaintances. Chief among friends.h.i.+ps was that with Joseph Milsand of Dijon, whose name is connected with _Sordello_ in the edition of Browning's "Poetical Works" of the year 1863. Under the t.i.tle "La Poesie Anglaise depuis Byron," two articles by Milsand were contributed to the "Revue des Deux Mondes," the first on Tennyson, the second (published 15th August 1851) a little before the poet's arrival in Paris, on Robert Browning. "Of all the poets known to me," wrote his French critic, "he is the most capable of summing up the conceptions of the religion, the ethics, and the theoretic knowledge of our period in forms which embody the beauty proper to such abstractions." Such criticism by a thoughtful student of our literature could not but prepare the way pleasantly for personal acquaintance. Milsand, we are told by his friend Th. Bentzon (Mme. Blanc), having hesitated as to the propriety of printing a pa.s.sage in an article as yet unpublished, in which he had spoken of the great sorrow of Mrs Browning's early life--the death of her brother, went straight to Browning, who was then in Paris, and declared that he was ready to cancel what he had written if it would cause her pain. "Only a Frenchman," exclaimed Browning, grasping both hands of his visitor, "would have done this." So began a friends.h.i.+p of an intimate and most helpful kind, which closed only with Milsand's death in 1886. To his memory is dedicated the volume published soon after his death, _Parleyings with certain People of Importance_. "I never knew or shall know his like among men," wrote Browning; and again: "No words can express the love I have for him." And in _Red Cotton Nightcap Country_ it is Milsand who is characterised in the lines:

He knows more and loves better than the world That never heard his name and never may, ...

What hinders that my heart relieve itself, O friend! who makest warm my wintry world, And wise my heaven, if there we consort too.

In the correction of Browning's proof-sheets, and especially in regulating the punctuation of his poems, Milsand's friendly services were of high value. In 1858 when Browning happened to be at Dijon, and had reason to believe, though in fact erroneously, that his friend was absent in Paris, he went twice "in a pa.s.sion of friends.h.i.+p," as his wife tells a correspondent, to stand before Maison Milsand, and muse, and bless the threshold.[49]

Browning desired much to know Victor Hugo, but his wish was never gratified. After December 2nd Paris could not contain a spirit so fiery as Hugo's was in hostility to the new regime and its chief representative. Balzac, whom it would have been a happiness even to look at, was dead. Lamartine promised a visit, but for a time his coming was delayed. By a mischance Alfred de Musset failed to appear when Browning, expecting to meet him, was the guest of M. Buloz. But Beranger was to be seen "in his white hat wandering along the asphalte." The blind historian Thierry begged Browning and his wife to call upon him. At the house of Ary Scheffer, the painter, they heard Mme. Viardot sing; and receptions given by Lady Elgin and Mme. Mohl were means of introduction to much that was interesting in the social life of Paris. At the theatre they saw with the deepest excitement "La Dame aux Camelias," which was running its hundred nights. Caricatures in the streets exhibited the occupants of the pit protected by umbrellas from the rain of tears that fell from the boxes. Tears, indeed, ran down Browning's cheeks, though he had believed himself hardened against theatrical pathos. Mrs Browning cried herself ill, and p.r.o.nounced the play painful but profoundly moral.

Mrs Browning's admiration of the writings of George Sand was so great that it would have been a sore disappointment to her if George Sand were to prove inaccessible. A letter of introduction to her had been obtained from Mazzini. "Ah, I am so vexed about George Sand," Mrs Browning wrote on Christmas Eve; "she came, she has gone, and we haven't met." In February she again was known to be for a few days in Paris; Browning was not eager to push through difficulties on the chance of obtaining an interview, but his wife was all impatience: "' No,' said I, 'you _shan't_ be proud, and I _won't_ be proud, and we _will_ see her. I won't die, if I can help it, without seeing George Sand.'" A gracious reply and an appointment came in response to their joint-pet.i.tion which accompanied Mazzini's letter. On the appointed Sunday Browning and Mrs Browning--she wearing a respirator and smothered in furs--drove to render their thanks and homage to the most ill.u.s.trious of Frenchwomen.

Mrs Browning with beating heart stooped and kissed her hand. They found in George Sand's face no sweetness, but great moral and intellectual capacities; in manners and conversation she was absolutely simple. Young men formed the company, to whom she addressed counsel and command with the utmost freedom and a conscious authority. Through all her speech a certain undercurrent of scorn, a half-veiled touch of disdain, was perceptible. At their parting she invited the English visitors to come again, kissed Mrs Browning on the lips, and received Browning's kiss upon her hand. The second call upon her was less agreeable. She sat warming her feet in a circle of eight or nine ill-bred men, representatives of "the ragged Red diluted with the lower theatrical."