The Complete Works of Robert Browning: Poems, Plays, Letters & Biographies in One Edition. Robert Browning

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СКАЧАТЬ his friends recalled regretfully in later years, when of two or three engagements which ought to have divided his afternoon, a single one — perhaps only the most formally pressing — could be fulfilled. Soon after his final return to England, while he still lived in comparative seclusion, certain habits of friendly intercourse, often superficial, but always binding, had rooted themselves in his life. London society, as I have also implied, opened itself to him in ever-widening circles, or, as it would be truer to say, drew him more and more deeply into its whirl; and even before the mellowing kindness of his nature had infused warmth into the least substantial of his social relations, the imaginative curiosity of the poet — for a while the natural ambition of the man — found satisfaction in it. For a short time, indeed, he entered into the fashionable routine of country-house visiting. Besides the instances I have already given, and many others which I may have forgotten, he was heard of, during the earlier part of this decade, as the guest of Lord Carnarvon at Highclere Castle, of Lord Shrewsbury at Alton Towers, of Lord Brownlow and his mother, Lady Marian Alford, at Belton and Ashridge. Somewhat later, he stayed with Mr. and Lady Alice Gaisford at a house they temporarily occupied on the Sussex downs; with Mr. Cholmondeley at Condover, and, much more recently, at Aynhoe Park with Mr. and Mrs. Cartwright. Kind and pressing, and in themselves very tempting invitations of this nature came to him until the end of his life; but he very soon made a practice of declining them, because their acceptance could only renew for him the fatigues of the London season, while the tantalizing beauty and repose of the country lay before his eyes; but such visits, while they continued, were one of the necessary social experiences which brought their grist to his mill.

      And now, in addition to the large social tribute which he received, and had to pay, he was drinking in all the enjoyment, and incurring all the fatigue which the London musical world could create for him. In Italy he had found the natural home of the other arts. The one poem, ‘Old Pictures in Florence’, is sufficiently eloquent of long communion with the old masters and their works; and if his history in Florence and Rome had been written in his own letters instead of those of his wife, they must have held many reminiscences of galleries and studios, and of the places in which pictures are bought and sold. But his love for music was as certainly starved as the delight in painting and sculpture was nourished; and it had now grown into a passion, from the indulgence of which he derived, as he always declared, some of the most beneficent influences of his life. It would be scarcely an exaggeration to say that he attended every important concert of the season, whether isolated or given in a course. There was no engagement possible or actual, which did not yield to the discovery of its clashing with the day and hour fixed for one of these. His frequent companion on such occasions was Miss Egerton-Smith.

      Miss Smith became only known to Mr. Browning’s general acquaintance through the dedicatory ‘A. E. S.’ of ‘La Saisiaz’; but she was, at the time of her death, one of his oldest women friends. He first met her as a young woman in Florence when she was visiting there; and the love for and proficiency in music soon asserted itself as a bond of sympathy between them. They did not, however, see much of each other till he had finally left Italy, and she also had made her home in London. She there led a secluded life, although free from family ties, and enjoying a large income derived from the ownership of an important provincial paper. Mr. Browning was one of the very few persons whose society she cared to cultivate; and for many years the common musical interest took the practical, and for both of them convenient form, of their going to concerts together. After her death, in the autumn of 1877, he almost mechanically renounced all the musical entertainments to which she had so regularly accompanied him. The special motive and special facility were gone — she had been wont to call for him in her carriage; the habit was broken; there would have been first pain, and afterwards an unwelcome exertion in renewing it. Time was also beginning to sap his strength, while society, and perhaps friendship, were making increasing claims upon it. It may have been for this same reason that music after a time seemed to pass out of his life altogether. Yet its almost sudden eclipse was striking in the case of one who not only had been so deeply susceptible to its emotional influences, so conversant with its scientific construction and its multitudinous forms, but who was acknowledged as ‘musical’ by those who best knew the subtle and complex meaning of that often misused term.

      Mr. Browning could do all that I have said during the period through which we are now following him; but he could not quite do it with impunity. Each winter brought its searching attack of cold and cough; each summer reduced him to the state of nervous prostration or physical apathy of which I have already spoken, and which at once rendered change imperative, and the exertion of seeking it almost intolerable. His health and spirits rebounded at the first draught of foreign air; the first breath from an English cliff or moor might have had the same result. But the remembrance of this fact never nerved him to the preliminary effort. The conviction renewed itself with the close of every season, that the best thing which could happen to him would be to be left quiet at home; and his disinclination to face even the idea of moving equally hampered his sister in her endeavour to make timely arrangements for their change of abode.

      This special craving for rest helped to limit the area from which their summer resort could be chosen. It precluded all idea of ‘pension’-life, hence of any much-frequented spot in Switzerland or Germany. It was tacitly understood that the shortening days were not to be passed in England. Italy did not yet associate itself with the possibilities of a moderately short absence; the resources of the northern French coast were becoming exhausted; and as the August of 1874 approached, the question of how and where this and the following months were to be spent was, perhaps, more than ever a perplexing one. It was now Miss Smith who became the means of its solution. She had more than once joined Mr. and Miss Browning at the seaside. She was anxious this year to do so again, and she suggested for their meeting a quiet spot called Mers, almost adjoining the fashionable Treport, but distinct from it. It was agreed that they should try it; and the experiment, which they had no reason to regret, opened also in some degree a way out of future difficulties. Mers was young, and had the defect of its quality. Only one desirable house was to be found there; and the plan of joint residence became converted into one of joint housekeeping, in which Mr. and Miss Browning at first refused to concur, but which worked so well that it was renewed in the three ensuing summers: Miss Smith retaining the initiative in the choice of place, her friends the right of veto upon it. They stayed again together in 1875 at Villers, on the coast of Normandy; in 1876 at the Isle of Arran; in 1877 at a house called La Saisiaz — Savoyard for the sun — in the Saleve district near Geneva.

      The autumn months of 1874 were marked for Mr. Browning by an important piece of work: the production of ‘Aristophanes’ Apology’. It was far advanced when he returned to London in November, after a visit to Antwerp, where his son was studying art under M. Heyermans; and its much later appearance must have been intended to give breathing time to the readers of ‘Red Cotton Nightcap Country’. Mr. Browning subsequently admitted that he sometimes, during these years, allowed active literary occupation to interfere too much with the good which his holiday might have done him; but the temptations to literary activity were this time too great to be withstood. The house occupied by him at Mers (Maison Robert) was the last of the straggling village, and stood on a rising cliff. In front was the open sea; beyond it a long stretch of down; everywhere comparative solitude. Here, in uninterrupted quiet, and in a room devoted to his use, Mr. Browning would work till the afternoon was advanced, and then set forth on a long walk over the cliffs, often in the face of a wind which, as he wrote of it at the time, he could lean against as if it were a wall. And during this time he was living, not only in his work, but with the man who had inspired it. The image of Aristophanes, in the half-shamed insolence, the disordered majesty, in which he is placed before the reader’s mind, was present to him from the first moment in which the Defence was conceived. What was still more interesting, he could see him, hear him, think with him, speak for him, and still inevitably condemn him. No such instance of always ingenious, and sometimes earnest pleading foredoomed to complete discomfiture, occurs in Mr. Browning’s works.

      To Aristophanes he gave the dramatic sympathy which one lover of life can extend to another, though that other unduly extol its lower forms. To Euripides he brought the palm of the higher truth, to his work the tribute of the more pathetic human emotion. СКАЧАТЬ