Life and Letters of Robert Browning Part 4

So far, therefore, from these sagacious ethics holding that

Debt cramps the energies of the soul, &c.

as thou pratest, 'tis plain that they have willed on the very outset to inculcate this truth on the mind of every man,--no barren and inconsequential dogma, but an effectual, ever influencing and productive rule of life,--that he is born a debtor, lives a debtor--aye, friend, and when thou diest, will not some judicious bystander,--no recreant as thou to the bonds of nature, but a good borrower and true--remark, as did his grandsire before him on like occasions, that thou hast 'paid the _debt_ of nature'? Ha! I have thee 'beyond the rules', as one (a bailiff) may say!

* Miss Hickey, on reading this pa.s.sage, has called my attention to the fact that the sentiment which it parodies is identical with that expressed in these words of 'Prospice',

... in a minute pay glad life's arrears Of pain, darkness, and cold.

Such performances supplied a distraction to the more serious work of writing 'Paracelsus', which was to be concluded in March 1835, and which occupied the foregoing winter months. We do not know to what extent Mr.

Browning had remained in communication with Mr. Fox; but the following letters show that the friend of 'Pauline' gave ready and efficient help in the strangely difficult task of securing a publisher for the new poem.

The first is dated April 2, 1835.

Dear Sir,--I beg to acknowledge the receipt of your letter:--Sardanapalus 'could not go on multiplying kingdoms'--nor I protestations--but I thank you very much.

You will oblige me indeed by forwarding the introduction to Moxon. I merely suggested him in particular, on account of his good name and fame among author-folk, besides he has himself written--as the Americans say--'more poetry 'an you can shake a stick at.' So I hope we shall come to terms.

I also hope my poem will turn out not utterly unworthy your kind interest, and more deserving your favour than anything of mine you have as yet seen; indeed I all along proposed to myself such an endeavour, for it will never do for one so distinguished by past praise to prove n.o.body after all--'nous verrons'. I am, dear sir, Yours most truly and obliged Robt. Browning.

On April 16 he wrote again as follows:

Dear Sir,

Your communication gladdened the c.o.c.kles of my heart. I lost no time in presenting myself to Moxon, but no sooner was Mr. Clarke's letter perused than the Moxonian visage loured exceedingly thereat--the Moxonian accent grew dolorous thereupon:--'Artevelde' has not paid expenses by about thirty odd pounds. Tennyson's poetry is 'popular at Cambridge', and yet of 800 copies which were printed of his last, some 300 only have gone off: Mr. M. hardly knows whether he shall ever venture again, &c. &c., and in short begs to decline even inspecting, &c. &c.

I called on Saunders and Otley at once, and, marvel of marvels, do really think there is some chance of our coming to decent terms--I shall know at the beginning of next week, but am not over-sanguine.

You will 'sarve me out'? two words to that; being the man you are, you must need very little telling from me, of the real feeling I have of your criticism's worth, and if I have had no more of it, surely I am hardly to blame, who have in more than one instance bored you sufficiently: but not a particle of your article has been rejected or neglected by your observant humble servant, and very proud shall I be if my new work bear in it the marks of the influence under which it was undertaken--and if I prove not a fit compeer of the potter in Horace who antic.i.p.ated an amphora and produced a porridge-pot. I purposely keep back the subject until you see my conception of its capabilities--otherwise you would be planning a vase fit to give the go-by to Evander's best crockery, which my cantharus would cut but a sorry figure beside--hardly up to the ansa.

But such as it is, it is very earnest and suggestive--and likely I hope to do good; and though I am rather scared at the thought of a _fresh eye_ going over its 4,000 lines--discovering blemishes of all sorts which my one wit cannot avail to detect, fools treated as sages, obscure pa.s.sages, slipshod verses, and much that worse is,--yet on the whole I am not much afraid of the issue, and I would give something to be allowed to read it some morning to you--for every rap o' the knuckles I should get a clap o' the back, I know.

I have another affair on hand, rather of a more popular nature, I conceive, but not so decisive and explicit on a point or two--so I decide on trying the question with this:--I really shall _need_ your notice, on this account; I shall affix my name and stick my arms akimbo; there are a few precious bold bits here and there, and the drift and scope are awfully radical--I am 'off' for ever with the other side, but must by all means be 'on' with yours--a position once gained, worthier works shall follow--therefore a certain writer* who meditated a notice (it matters not laudatory or otherwise) on 'Pauline' in the 'Examiner', must be benignant or supercilious as he shall choose, but in no case an idle spectator of my first appearance on any stage (having previously only dabbled in private theatricals) and bawl 'Hats off!' 'Down in front!' &c., as soon as I get to the proscenium; and he may depend that tho' my 'Now is the winter of our discontent' be rather awkward, yet there shall be occasional outbreaks of good stuff--that I shall warm as I get on, and finally wish 'Richmond at the bottom of the seas,' &c. in the best style imaginable.

* Mr. John Stuart Mill.

Excuse all this swagger, I know you will, and

(The signature has been cut off; evidently for an autograph.)

Mr. Effingham Wilson was induced to publish the poem, but more, we understand, on the ground of radical sympathies in Mr. Fox and the author than on that of its intrinsic worth.

The t.i.tle-page of 'Paracelsus' introduces us to one of the warmest friends.h.i.+ps of Mr. Browning's life. Count de Ripert-Monclar was a young French Royalist, one of those who had accompanied the d.u.c.h.esse de Berri on her Chouan expedition, and was then, for a few years, spending his summers in England; ostensibly for his pleasure, really--as he confessed to the Browning family--in the character of private agent of communication between the royal exiles and their friends in France. He was four years older than the poet, and of intellectual tastes which created an immediate bond of union between them. In the course of one of their conversations, he suggested the life of Paracelsus as a possible subject for a poem; but on second thoughts p.r.o.nounced it unsuitable, because it gave no room for the introduction of love: about which, he added, every young man of their age thought he had something quite new to say. Mr. Browning decided, after the necessary study, that he would write a poem on Paracelsus, but treating him in his own way. It was dedicated, in fulfilment of a promise, to the friend to whom its inspiration had been due.

The Count's visits to England entirely ceased, and the two friends did not meet for twenty years. Then, one day, in a street in Rome, Mr.

Browning heard a voice behind him crying, 'Robert!' He turned, and there was 'Amedee'. Both were, by that time, married; the Count--then, I believe, Marquis--to an English lady, Miss Jerningham. Mrs. Browning, to whom of course he was introduced, liked him very much.*

* A minor result of the intimacy was that Mr. Browning became member, in 1835, of the Inst.i.tut Historique, and in 1836 of the Societe Francaise de Statistique Universelle, to both of which learned bodies his friend belonged.

Mr. Browning did treat Paracelsus in his own way; and in so doing produced a character--at all events a history--which, according to recent judgments, approached far nearer to the reality than any conception which had until then been formed of it. He had carefully collected all the known facts of the great discoverer's life, and interpreted them with a sympathy which was no less an intuition of their truth than a reflection of his own genius upon them. We are enabled in some measure to judge of this by a paper ent.i.tled 'Paracelsus, the Reformer of Medicine', written by Dr. Edward Berdoe for the Browning Society, and read at its October meeting in 1888; and in the difficulty which exists for most of us of verifying the historical data of Mr. Browning's poem, it becomes a valuable guide to, as well as an interesting comment upon it.

Dr. Berdoe reminds us that we cannot understand the real Paracelsus without reference to the occult sciences so largely cultivated in his day, as also to the mental atmosphere which produced them; and he quotes in ill.u.s.tration a pa.s.sage from the writings of that Bishop of Spanheim who was the instructor of Paracelsus, and who appears as such in the poem. The pa.s.sage is a definition of divine magic, which is apparently another term for alchemy; and lays down the great doctrine of all mediaeval occultism, as of all modern theosophy--of a soul-power equally operative in the material and the immaterial, in nature and in the consciousness of man.

The same clue will guide us, as no other can, through what is apparently conflicting in the aims and methods, anomalous in the moral experience, of the Paracelsus of the poem. His feverish pursuit, among the things of Nature, of an ultimate of knowledge, not contained, even in fragments, in her isolated truths; the sense of failure which haunts his most valuable attainments; his tampering with the lower or diabolic magic, when the divine has failed; the ascetic exaltation in which he begins his career; the sudden awakening to the spiritual sterility which has been consequent on it; all these find their place, if not always their counterpart, in the real life.

The language of Mr. Browning's Paracelsus, his att.i.tude towards himself and the world, are not, however, quite consonant with the alleged facts.

They are more appropriate to an ardent explorer of the world of abstract thought than to a mystical scientist pursuing the secret of existence.

He preserves, in all his mental vicissitudes, a loftiness of tone and a unity of intention, difficult to connect, even in fancy, with the real man, in whom the inherited superst.i.tions and the prognostics of true science must often have clashed with each other. Dr. Berdoe's picture of the 'Reformer' drawn more directly from history, conveys this double impression. Mr. Browning has rendered him more simple by, as it were, recasting him in the atmosphere of a more modern time, and of his own intellectual life. This poem still, therefore, belongs to the same group as 'Pauline', though, as an effort of dramatic creation, superior to it.

We find the Poet with still less of dramatic disguise in the deathbed revelation which forms so beautiful a close to the story. It supplies a fitter comment to the errors of the dramatic Paracelsus, than to those of the historical, whether or not its utterance was within the compa.s.s of historical probability, as Dr. Berdoe believes. In any case it was the direct product of Mr. Browning's mind, and expressed what was to be his permanent conviction. It might then have been an echo of German pantheistic philosophies. From the point of view of science--of modern science at least--it was prophetic; although the prophecy of one for whom evolution could never mean less or more than a divine creation operating on this progressive plan.

The more striking, perhaps, for its personal quality are the evidences of imaginative sympathy, even direct human insight, in which the poem abounds. Festus is, indeed, an essentially human creature: the man--it might have been the woman--of unambitious intellect and large intelligence of the heart, in whom so many among us have found comfort and help. We often feel, in reading 'Pauline', that the poet in it was older than the man. The impression is more strongly and more definitely conveyed by this second work, which has none of the intellectual crudeness of 'Pauline', though it still belongs to an early phase of the author's intellectual life. Not only its mental, but its moral maturity, seems so much in advance of his uncompleted twenty-third year.

To the first edition of 'Paracelsus' was affixed a preface, now long discarded, but which acquires fresh interest in a retrospect of the author's completed work; for it lays down the constant principle of dramatic creation by which that work was to be inspired. It also antic.i.p.ates probable criticism of the artistic form which on this, and so many subsequent occasions, he selected for it.

'I am anxious that the reader should not, at the very outset--mistaking my performance for one of a cla.s.s with which it has nothing in common--judge it by principles on which it was never moulded, and subject it to a standard to which it was never meant to conform. I therefore antic.i.p.ate his discovery, that it is an attempt, probably more novel than happy, to reverse the method usually adopted by writers whose aim it is to set forth any phenomenon of the mind or the pa.s.sions, by the operation of persons and events; and that, instead of having recourse to an external machinery of incidents to create and evolve the crisis I desire to produce, I have ventured to display somewhat minutely the mood itself in its rise and progress, and have suffered the agency by which it is influenced and determined, to be generally discernible in its effects alone, and subordinate throughout, if not altogether excluded: and this for a reason. I have endeavoured to write a poem, not a drama: the canons of the drama are well known, and I cannot but think that, inasmuch as they have immediate regard to stage representation, the peculiar advantages they hold out are really such only so long as the purpose for which they were at first inst.i.tuted is kept in view. I do not very well understand what is called a Dramatic Poem, wherein all those restrictions only submitted to on account of compensating good in the original scheme are scrupulously retained, as though for some special fitness in themselves--and all new facilities placed at an author's disposal by the vehicle he selects, as pertinaciously rejected.

Mr. Fox reviewed this also in the 'Monthly Repository'. The article might be obtained through the kindness of Mrs. Bridell-Fox; but it will be sufficient for my purpose to refer to its closing paragraph, as given by her in the 'Argosy' of February 1890. It was a final expression of what the writer regarded as the fitting intellectual att.i.tude towards a rising poet, whose aims and methods lay so far beyond the range of the conventional rules of poetry. The great event in the history of 'Paracelsus' was John Forster's article on it in the 'Examiner'. Mr.

Forster had recently come to town. He could barely have heard Mr.

Browning's name, and, as he afterwards told him, was perplexed in reading the poem by the question of whether its author was an old or a young man; but he knew that a writer in the 'Athenaeum' had called it rubbish, and he had taken it up as a probable subject for a piece of slas.h.i.+ng criticism. What he did write can scarcely be defined as praise.

It was the simple, ungrudging admission of the unequivocal power, as well as brilliant promise, which he recognized in the work. This mutual experience was the introduction to a long and, certainly on Mr.

Browning's part, a sincere friends.h.i.+p.

Chapter 6

1835-1838

Removal to Hatcham; some Particulars--Renewed Intercourse with the second Family of Robert Browning's Grandfather--Reuben Browning--William Shergold Browning--Visitors at Hatcham--Thomas Carlyle--Social Life--New Friends and Acquaintance--Introduction to Macready--New Year's Eve at Elm Place--Introduction to John Forster--Miss f.a.n.n.y Haworth--Miss Martineau--Serjeant Talfourd--The 'Ion' Supper--'Strafford'--Relations with Macready--Performance of 'Strafford'--Letters concerning it from Mr. Browning and Miss Flower--Personal Glimpses of Robert Browning--Rival Forms of Dramatic Inspiration--Relation of 'Strafford'

to 'Sordello'--Mr. Robertson and the 'Westminster Review'.

It was soon after this time, though the exact date cannot be recalled, that the Browning family moved from Camberwell to Hatcham. Some such change had long been in contemplation, for their house was now too small; and the finding one more suitable, in the latter place, had decided the question. The new home possessed great attractions. The long, low rooms of its upper storey supplied abundant accommodation for the elder Mr. Browning's six thousand books. Mrs. Browning was suffering greatly from her chronic ailment, neuralgia; and the large garden, opening on to the Surrey hills, promised her all the benefits of country air. There were a coach-house and stable, which, by a curious, probably old-fas.h.i.+oned, arrangement, formed part of the house, and were accessible from it. Here the 'good horse', York, was eventually put up; and near this, in the garden, the poet soon had another though humbler friend in the person of a toad, which became so much attached to him that it would follow him as he walked. He visited it daily, where it burrowed under a white rose tree, announcing himself by a pinch of gravel dropped into its hole; and the creature would crawl forth, allow its head to be gently tickled, and reward the act with that loving glance of the soft full eyes which Mr. Browning has recalled in one of the poems of 'Asolando'.

This change of residence brought the grandfather's second family, for the first time, into close as well as friendly contact with the first.

Mr. Browning had always remained on outwardly friendly terms with his stepmother; and both he and his children were rewarded for this forbearance by the cordial relations which grew up between themselves and two of her sons. But in the earlier days they lived too far apart for frequent meeting. The old Mrs. Browning was now a widow, and, in order to be near her relations, she also came to Hatcham, and established herself there in close neighbourhood to them. She had then with her only a son and a daughter, those known to the poet's friends as Uncle Reuben and Aunt Jemima; respectively nine years, and one year, older than he. 'Aunt Jemima' married not long afterwards, and is chiefly remembered as having been very amiable, and, in early youth, to use her nephew's words, 'as beautiful as the day;' but kindly, merry 'Uncle Reuben', then clerk in the Rothschilds' London bank,* became a conspicuous member of the family circle. This does not mean that the poet was ever indebted to him for pecuniary help; and it is desirable that this should be understood, since it has been confidently a.s.serted that he was so. So long as he was dependent at all, he depended exclusively on his father. Even the use of his uncle's horse, which might have been accepted as a friendly concession on Mr. Reuben's part, did not really represent one. The animal stood, as I have said, in Mr.

Browning's stable, and it was groomed by his gardener. The promise of these conveniences had induced Reuben Browning to buy a horse instead of continuing to hire one. He could only ride it on a few days of the week, and it was rather a gain than a loss to him that so good a horseman as his nephew should exercise it during the interval.

* This uncle's name, and his business relations with the great Jewish firm, have contributed to the mistaken theory of the poet's descent.