Life and Letters of Robert Browning

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The second letter, from Cambridge, was short and written in haste, at
the moment of Mr. Browning's departure; but it tells the same tale of
general kindness and attention. Engagements for no less than six meals
had absorbed the first day of the visit. The occasion was that of
Professor Joachim's investiture with his Doctor's degree; and Mr.
Browning declares that this ceremony, the concert given by the great
violinist, and his society, were 'each and all' worth the trouble of
the journey. He himself was to receive the Cambridge degree of LL.D. in
1879, the Oxford D.C.L. in 1882. A passage in another letter addressed
to the same friend, refers probably to a practical reminiscence of 'Red
Cotton Nightcap Country', which enlivened the latter experience, and
which Mrs. Fitz-Gerald had witnessed with disapprobation.*

* An actual red cotton nightcap had been made to flutter
down on to the Poet's head.


. . . You are far too hard on the very harmless drolleries of the young
men, licensed as they are moreover by immemorial usage. Indeed there
used to be a regularly appointed jester, 'Filius Terrae' he was called,
whose business it was to jibe and jeer at the honoured ones, by way of
reminder that all human glories are merely gilded bubbles and must not
be fancied metal. You saw that the Reverend Dons escaped no more than
the poor Poet--or rather I should say than myself the poor Poet--for
I was pleased to observe with what attention they listened to the
Newdigate. . . . Ever affectionately yours, R. Browning.


In 1875 he was unanimously nominated by its Independent Club, to the
office of Lord Rector of the University of Glasgow; and in 1877 he again
received the offer of the Rectorship of St. Andrews, couched in very
urgent and flattering terms. A letter addressed to him from this
University by Dr. William Knight, Professor of Moral Philosophy there,
which I have his permission to publish, bears witness to what had
long been and was always to remain a prominent fact of Mr. Browning's
literary career: his great influence on the minds of the rising
generation of his countrymen.


The University, St. Andrews N.B.: Nov. 17, 1877.

My dear Sir,--. . . The students of this University, in which I have
the honour to hold office, have nominated you as their Lord Rector; and
intend unanimously, I am told, to elect you to that office on Thursday.

I believe that hitherto no Rector has been chosen by the undivided
suffrage of any Scottish University. They have heard however that you
are unable to accept the office: and your committee, who were deeply
disappointed to learn this afternoon of the way in which you have been
informed of their intentions, are, I believe, writing to you on the
subject. So keen is their regret that they intend respectfully to wait
upon you on Tuesday morning by deputation, and ask if you cannot waive
your difficulties in deference to their enthusiasm, and allow them to
proceed with your election.

Their suffrage may, I think, be regarded as one sign of how the
thoughtful youth of Scotland estimate the work you have done in the
world of letters.

And permit me to say that while these Rectorial elections in the other
Universities have frequently turned on local questions, or been inspired
by political partisanship, St. Andrews has honourably sought to choose
men distinguished for literary eminence, and to make the Rectorship a
tribute at once of intellectual and moral esteem.

May I add that when the 'perfervidum ingenium' of our northern race
takes the form not of youthful hero-worship, but of loyal admiration and
respectful homage, it is a very genuine affair. In the present instance
I may say it is no mere outburst of young undisciplined enthusiasm, but
an honest expression of intellectual and moral indebtedness, the genuine
and distinct tribute of many minds that have been touched to some higher
issues by what you have taught them. They do not presume to speak of
your place in English literature. They merely tell you by this proffered
honour (the highest in their power to bestow), how they have felt your
influence over them.

My own obligations to you, and to the author of Aurora Leigh, are such,
that of them 'silence is golden'. Yours ever gratefully. William Knight.


Mr. Browning was deeply touched and gratified by these professions of
esteem. He persisted nevertheless in his refusal. The Glasgow nomination
had also been declined by him.

On August 17, 1877, he wrote to Mrs. Fitz-Gerald from La Saisiaz:


'How lovely is this place in its solitude and seclusion, with its trees
and shrubs and flowers, and above all its live mountain stream which
supplies three fountains, and two delightful baths, a marvel of delicate
delight framed in with trees--I bathe there twice a day--and then what
wonderful views from the chalet on every side! Geneva lying under
us, with the lake and the whole plain bounded by the Jura and our own
Saleve, which latter seems rather close behind our house, and yet takes
a hard hour and a half to ascend--all this you can imagine since you
know the environs of the town; the peace and quiet move me the most--And
I fancy I shall drowse out the two months or more, doing no more of
serious work than reading--and that is virtuous renunciation of the
glorious view to my right here--as I sit aerially like Euripides, and
see the clouds come and go and the view change in correspondence with
them. It will help me to get rid of the pain which attaches itself to
the recollections of Lucerne and Berne "in the old days when the Greeks
suffered so much," as Homer says. But a very real and sharp pain touched
me here when I heard of the death of poor Virginia March whom I knew
particularly, and parted with hardly a fortnight ago, leaving her
affectionate and happy as ever. The tones of her voice as on one
memorable occasion she ejaculated repeatedly 'Good friend!' are fresh
still. Poor Virginia! . . .'


Mr. Browning was more than quiescent during this stay in the Savoyard
mountains. He was unusually depressed, and unusually disposed to regard
the absence from home as a banishment; and he tried subsequently to
account for this condition by the shadow which coming trouble sometimes
casts before it. It was more probably due to the want of the sea air
which he had enjoyed for so many years, and to that special oppressive
heat of the Swiss valleys which ascends with them to almost their
highest level. When he said that the Saleve seemed close behind the
house, he was saying in other words that the sun beat back from, and the
air was intercepted by it. We see, nevertheless, in his description
of the surrounding scenery, a promise of the contemplative delight in
natural beauty to be henceforth so conspicuous in his experience, and
which seemed a new feature in it. He had hitherto approached every
living thing with curious and sympathetic observation--this hardly
requires saying of one who had animals for his first and always familiar
friends. Flowers also attracted him by their perfume. But what he loved
in nature was essentially its prefiguring of human existence, or
its echo of it; and it never appeared, in either his works or his
conversation, that he was much impressed by its inanimate forms--by even
those larger phenomena of mountain and cloud-land on which the latter
dwells. Such beauty as most appealed to him he had left behind with
the joys and sorrows of his Italian life, and it had almost inevitably
passed out of his consideration. During years of his residence in London
he never thought of the country as a source of pleasurable emotions,
other than those contingent on renewed health; and the places to which
he resorted had often not much beyond their health-giving qualities to
recommend them; his appetite for the beautiful had probably dwindled for
lack of food. But when a friend once said to him: 'You have not a great
love for nature, have you?' he had replied: 'Yes, I have, but I love
men and women better;' and the admission, which conveyed more than it
literally expressed, would have been true I believe at any, up to the
present, period of his history. Even now he did not cease to love men
and women best; but he found increasing enjoyment in the beauties of
nature, above all as they opened upon him on the southern slopes of the
Alps; and the delight of the aesthetic sense merged gradually in the
satisfied craving for pure air and brilliant sunshine which marked his
final struggle for physical life. A ring of enthusiasm comes into his
letters from the mountains, and deepens as the years advance; doubtless
enhanced by the great--perhaps too great--exhilaration which the Alpine
atmosphere produced, but also in large measure independent of it. Each
new place into which the summer carries him he declares more beautiful
than the last. It possibly was so.

A touch of autumnal freshness had barely crept into the atmosphere of
the Saleve, when a moral thunderbolt fell on the little group of persons
domiciled at its base: Miss Egerton-Smith died, in what had seemed
for her unusually good health, in the act of preparing for a mountain
excursion with her friends--the words still almost on her lips in
which she had given some directions for their comfort. Mr. Browning's
impressionable nervous system was for a moment paralyzed by the shock.
It revived in all the emotional and intellectual impulses which gave
birth to 'La Saisiaz'.

This poem contains, besides its personal reference and association,
elements of distinctive biographical interest. It is the author's
first--as also last--attempt to reconstruct his hope of immortality by
a rational process based entirely on the fundamental facts of his own
knowledge and consciousness--God and the human soul; and while the very
assumption of these facts, as basis for reasoning, places him at issue
with scientific thought, there is in his way of handling them a tribute
to the scientific spirit, perhaps foreshadowed in the beautiful epilogue
to 'Dramatis Personae', but of which there is no trace in his earlier
religious works. It is conclusive both in form and matter as to his
heterodox attitude towards Christianity. He was no less, in his way, a
Christian when he wrote 'La Saisiaz' than when he published 'A Death
in the Desert' and 'Christmas Eve and Easter Day'; or at any period
subsequent to that in which he accepted without questioning what he had
learned at his mother's knee. He has repeatedly written or declared in
the words of Charles Lamb:* 'If Christ entered the room I should fall
on my knees;' and again, in those of Napoleon: 'I am an understander of
men, and _he_ was no man.' He has even added: 'If he had been, he would
have been an impostor.' But the arguments, in great part negative, set
forth in 'La Saisiaz' for the immortality of the soul, leave no place
for the idea, however indefinite, of a Christian revelation on the
subject. Christ remained for Mr. Browning a mystery and a message of
Divine Love, but no messenger of Divine intention towards mankind.

* These words have more significance when taken with their
context. 'If Shakespeare was to come into the room, we
should all rise up to meet him; but if that Person [meaning
Christ] was to come into the room, we should all fall down
and try to kiss the hem of his garment.'

The dialogue between Fancy and Reason is not only an admission of
uncertainty as to the future of the Soul: it is a plea for it; and as
such it gathers up into its few words of direct statement, threads of
reasoning which have been traceable throughout Mr. Browning's work. In
this plea for uncertainty lies also a full and frank acknowledgment of
the value of the earthly life; and as interpreted by his general views,
that value asserts itself, not only in the means of probation which
life affords, but in its existing conditions of happiness. No one, he
declares, possessing the certainty of a future state would patiently and
fully live out the present; and since the future can be only the ripened
fruit of the present, its promise would be neutralized, as well as
actual experience dwarfed, by a definite revelation. Nor, conversely,
need the want of a certified future depress the present spiritual and
moral life. It is in the nature of the Soul that it would suffer from
the promise. The existence of God is a justification for hope. And
since the certainty would be injurious to the Soul, hence destructive
to itself, the doubt--in other words, the hope--becomes a sufficient
approach to, a working substitute for it. It is pathetic to see how
in spite of the convictions thus rooted in Mr. Browning's mind, the
expressed craving for more knowledge, for more light, will now and then
escape him.

Even orthodox Christianity gives no assurance of reunion to those whom
death has separated. It is obvious that Mr. Browning's poetic creed
could hold no conviction regarding it. He hoped for such reunion in
proportion as he wished. There must have been moments in his life when
the wish in its passion overleapt the bounds of hope. 'Prospice' appears
to prove this. But the wide range of imagination, no less than the lack
of knowledge, forbade in him any forecast of the possibilities of the
life to come. He believed that if granted, it would be an advance on the
present--an accession of knowledge if not an increase of happiness. He
was satisfied that whatever it gave, and whatever it withheld, it would
be good. In his normal condition this sufficed to him.

'La Saisiaz' appeared in the early summer of 1878, and with it 'The
Two Poets of Croisic', which had been written immediately after it. The
various incidents of this poem are strictly historical; they lead the
way to a characteristic utterance of Mr. Browning's philosophy of life
to which I shall recur later.

In 1872 Mr. Browning had published a first series of selections from his
works; it was to be followed by a second in 1880. In a preface to the
earlier volume, he indicates the plan which he has followed in the
choice and arrangement of poems; and some such intention runs also
through the second; since he declined a suggestion made to him for the
introduction or placing of a special poem, on the ground of its not
conforming to the end he had in view. It is difficult, in the one case
as in the other, to reconstruct the imagined personality to which his
preface refers; and his words on the later occasion pointed rather to
that idea of a chord of feeling which is raised by the correspondence of
the first and last poems of the respective groups. But either clue may
be followed with interest.




Chapter 18

1878-1884

He revisits Italy; Asolo; Letters to Mrs. Fitz-Gerald--Venice--Favourite
Alpine Retreats--Mrs. Arthur Bronson--Life in Venice--A Tragedy at
Saint-Pierre--Mr. Cholmondeley--Mr. Browning's Patriotic
Feeling; Extract from Letter to Mrs. Charles Skirrow--'Dramatic
Idyls'--'Jocoseria'--'Ferishtah's Fancies'.



The catastrophe of La Saisiaz closed a comprehensive chapter in Mr.
Browning's habits and experience. It impelled him finally to break with
the associations of the last seventeen autumns, which he remembered
more in their tedious or painful circumstances than in the unexciting
pleasure and renewed physical health which he had derived from them. He
was weary of the ever-recurring effort to uproot himself from his home
life, only to become stationary in some more or less uninteresting
northern spot. The always latent desire for Italy sprang up in him,
and with it the often present thought and wish to give his sister the
opportunity of seeing it.

Florence and Rome were not included in his scheme; he knew them both
too well; but he hankered for Asolo and Venice. He determined, though as
usual reluctantly, and not till the last moment, that they should move
southwards in the August of 1878. Their route lay over the Spluegen; and
having heard of a comfortable hotel near the summit of the Pass, they
agreed to remain there till the heat had sufficiently abated to allow
of the descent into Lombardy. The advantages of this first arrangement
exceeded their expectations. It gave them solitude without the sense
of loneliness. A little stream of travellers passed constantly over the
mountain, and they could shake hands with acquaintances at night, and
know them gone in the morning. They dined at the table d'hote, but took
all other meals alone, and slept in a detached wing or 'dependance'
of the hotel. Their daily walks sometimes carried them down to the Via
Mala; often to the top of the ascent, where they could rest, looking
down into Italy; and would even be prolonged over a period of five
hours and an extent of seventeen miles. Now, as always, the mountain air
stimulated Mr. Browning's physical energy; and on this occasion it also
especially quickened his imaginative powers. He was preparing the first
series of 'Dramatic Idylls'; and several of these, including 'Ivan
Ivanovitch', were produced with such rapidity that Miss Browning refused
to countenance a prolonged stay on the mountain, unless he worked at a
more reasonable rate.

They did not linger on their way to Asolo and Venice, except for a
night's rest on the Lake of Como and two days at Verona. In their
successive journeys through Northern Italy they visited by degrees all
its notable cities, and it would be easy to recall, in order and detail,
most of these yearly expeditions. But the account of them would chiefly
resolve itself into a list of names and dates; for Mr. Browning had
seldom a new impression to receive, even from localities which he had
not seen before. I know that he and his sister were deeply struck by
the deserted grandeurs of Ravenna; and that it stirred in both of them
a memorable sensation to wander as they did for a whole day through the
pinewoods consecrated by Dante. I am nevertheless not sure that when
they performed the repeated round of picture-galleries and palaces, they
were not sometimes simply paying their debt to opportunity, and as much
for each other's sake as for their own. Where all was Italy, there
was little to gain or lose in one memorial of greatness, one object
of beauty, visited or left unseen. But in Asolo, even in Venice, Mr.
Browning was seeking something more: the remembrance of his own actual
and poetic youth. How far he found it in the former place we may infer
from a letter to Mrs. Fitz-Gerald.


Sept. 28, 1878.

And from 'Asolo', at last, dear friend! So can dreams come _false_.--S.,
who has been writing at the opposite side of the table, has told you
about our journey and adventures, such as they were: but she cannot
tell you the feelings with which I revisit this--to me--memorable place
after above forty years' absence,--such things have begun and ended with
me in the interval! It was _too_ strange when we reached the ruined tower
on the hill-top yesterday, and I said 'Let me try if the echo still
exists which I discovered here,' (you can produce it from only _one_
particular spot on a remainder of brickwork--) and thereupon it answered
me plainly as ever, after all the silence: for some children from the
adjoining 'podere', happening to be outside, heard my voice and its
result--and began trying to perform the feat--calling 'Yes, yes'--all in
vain: so, perhaps, the mighty secret will die with me! We shall probably
stay here a day or two longer,--the air is so pure, the country so
attractive: but we must go soon to Venice, stay our allotted time there,
and then go homeward: you will of course address letters to Venice, not
this place: it is a pleasure I promise myself that, on arriving I shall
certainly hear you speak in a letter which I count upon finding.

The old inn here, to which I would fain have betaken myself, is
gone--levelled to the ground: I remember it was much damaged by a recent
earthquake, and the cracks and chasms may have threatened a downfall.
This Stella d'Oro is, however, much such an unperverted 'locanda' as its
predecessor--primitive indeed are the arrangements and unsophisticate
the ways: but there is cleanliness, abundance of goodwill, and the sweet
Italian smile at every mistake: we get on excellently. To be sure never
was such a perfect fellow-traveller, for my purposes, as S., so that
I have no subject of concern--if things suit me they suit her--and
vice-versa. I daresay she will have told you how we trudged together,
this morning to Possagno--through a lovely country: how we saw all the
wonders--and a wonder of detestability is the paint-performance of the
great man!--and how, on our return, we found the little town enjoying
high market day, and its privilege of roaring and screaming over a
bargain. It confuses me altogether,--but at Venice I may write more
comfortably. You will till then, Dear Friend, remember me ever as yours
affectionately, Robert Browning.


If the tone of this does not express disappointment, it has none of the
rapture which his last visit was to inspire. The charm which forty years
of remembrance had cast around the little city on the hill was dispelled
for, at all events, the time being. The hot weather and dust-covered
landscape, with the more than primitive accommodation of which he spoke
in a letter to another friend, may have contributed something to this
result.

At Venice the travellers fared better in some essential respects.
A London acquaintance, who passed them on their way to Italy, had
recommended a cool and quiet hotel there, the Albergo dell' Universo.
The house, Palazzo Brandolin-Rota, was situated on the shady side of
the Grand Canal, just below the Accademia and the Suspension Bridge. The
open stretches of the Giudecca lay not far behind; and a scrap of garden
and a clean and open little street made pleasant the approach from back
and side. It accommodated few persons in proportion to its size, and
fewer still took up their abode there; for it was managed by a lady of
good birth and fallen fortunes whose home and patrimony it had been; and
her husband, a retired Austrian officer, and two grown-up daughters
did not lighten her task. Every year the fortunes sank lower; the upper
storey of the house was already falling into decay, and the fine old
furniture passing into the brokers' or private buyers' hands. It still,
however, afforded sufficiently comfortable, and, by reason of its very
drawbacks, desirable quarters to Mr. Browning. It perhaps turned the
scale in favour of his return to Venice; for the lady whose hospitality
he was to enjoy there was as yet unknown to him; and nothing would have
induced him to enter, with his eyes open, one of the English-haunted
hotels, in which acquaintance, old and new, would daily greet him in the
public rooms or jostle him in the corridors.

He and his sister remained at the Universo for a fortnight; their
programme did not this year include a longer stay; but it gave them time
to decide that no place could better suit them for an autumn holiday
than Venice, or better lend itself to a preparatory sojourn among the
Alps; and the plan of their next, and, though they did not know it, many
a following summer, was thus sketched out before the homeward journey
had begun.

Mr. Browning did not forget his work, even while resting from it; if
indeed he did rest entirely on this occasion. He consulted a Russian
lady whom he met at the hotel, on the names he was introducing in
'Ivan Ivanovitch'. It would be interesting to know what suggestions or
corrections she made, and how far they adapted themselves to the rhythm
already established, or compelled changes in it; but the one alternative
would as little have troubled him as the other. Mrs. Browning told Mr.
Prinsep that her husband could never alter the wording of a poem without
rewriting it, indeed, practically converting it into another; though he
more than once tried to do so at her instigation. But to the end of his
life he could at any moment recast a line or passage for the sake of
greater correctness, and leave all that was essential in it untouched.

Seven times more in the eleven years which remained to him, Mr. Browning
spent the autumn in Venice. Once also, in 1882, he had proceeded towards
it as far as Verona, when the floods which marked the autumn of that
year arrested his farther course. Each time he had halted first in some
more or less elevated spot, generally suggested by his French friend,
Monsieur Dourlans, himself an inveterate wanderer, whose inclinations
also tempted him off the beaten track. The places he most enjoyed were
Saint-Pierre la Chartreuse, and Gressoney Saint-Jean, where he stayed
respectively in 1881 and 1882, 1883 and 1885. Both of these had the
drawbacks, and what might easily have been the dangers, of remoteness
from the civilized world. But this weighed with him so little, that he
remained there in each case till the weather had broken, though there
was no sheltered conveyance in which he and his sister could travel
down; and on the later occasions at least, circumstances might easily
have combined to prevent their departure for an indefinite time. He
became, indeed, so attached to Gressoney, with its beautiful outlook
upon Monte Rosa, that nothing I believe would have hindered his
returning, or at least contemplating a return to it, but the great
fatigue to his sister of the mule ride up the mountain, by a path which
made walking, wherever possible, the easier course. They did walk _down_
it in the early October of 1885, and completed the hard seven hours'
trudge to San Martino d'Aosta, without an atom of refreshment or a
minute's rest.