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

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СКАЧАТЬ in his mind; but an incident, trivial in itself, though he did not think it so, destroyed the first scheme, and it was then practically too late to form another. During the second week in August the weather broke. There could no longer be any question of the northward journey without even a fixed end in view. His son and daughter had taken possession of their new home, the Palazzo Rezzonico, and were anxious to see him and Miss Browning there; their wishes naturally had weight. The casting vote in favour of Venice was given by a letter from Mrs. Bronson, proposing Asolo as the intermediate stage. She had fitted up for herself a little summer retreat there, and promised that her friends should, if they joined her, be also comfortably installed. The journey was this time propitious. It was performed without imprudent haste, and Mr. Browning reached Asolo unfatigued and to all appearance well.

      He saw this, his first love among Italian cities, at a season of the year more favourable to its beauty than even that of his first visit; yet he must himself have been surprised by the new rapture of admiration which it created in him, and which seemed to grow with his lengthened stay. This state of mind was the more striking, that new symptoms of his physical decline were now becoming apparent, and were in themselves of a depressing kind. He wrote to a friend in England, that the atmosphere of Asolo, far from being oppressive, produced in him all the effects of mountain air, and he was conscious of difficulty of breathing whenever he walked up hill. He also suffered, as the season advanced, great inconvenience from cold. The rooms occupied by himself and his sister were both unprovided with fireplaces; and though the daily dinner with Mrs. Bronson obviated the discomfort of the evenings, there remained still too many hours of the autumnal day in which the impossibility of heating their own little apartment must have made itself unpleasantly felt. The latter drawback would have been averted by the fulfilment of Mr. Browning’s first plan, to be in Venice by the beginning of October, and return to the comforts of his own home before the winter had quite set in; but one slight motive for delay succeeded another, till at last a more serious project introduced sufficient ground of detention. He seemed possessed by a strange buoyancy — an almost feverish joy in life, which blunted all sensations of physical distress, or helped him to misinterpret them. When warned against the imprudence of remaining where he knew he suffered from cold, and believed, rightly or wrongly, that his asthmatic tendencies were increased, he would reply that he was growing acclimatized — that he was quite well. And, in a fitful or superficial sense, he must have been so.

His letters of that period are one continuous picture, glowing with his impressions of the things which they describe. The same words will repeat themselves as the same subject presents itself to his pen; but the impulse to iteration scarcely ever affects us as mechanical. It seems always a fresh response to some new stimulus to thought or feeling, which he has received. These reach him from every side. It is not only the Asolo of this peaceful later time which has opened before him, but the Asolo of ‘Pippa Passes’ and ‘Sordello’; that which first stamped itself on his imagination in the echoes of the Court life of Queen Catharine,* and of the barbaric wars of the Eccelini. Some of his letters dwell especially on these early historical associations: on the strange sense of reopening the ancient chronicle which he had so deeply studied fifty years before. The very phraseology of the old Italian text, which I am certain he had never glanced at from that distant time, is audible in an account of the massacre of San Zenone, the scene of which he has been visiting. To the same correspondent he says that his two hours’ drive to Asolo ‘seemed to be a dream;’ and again, after describing, or, as he thinks, only trying to describe some beautiful feature of the place, ‘but it is indescribable!’

* Catharine Cornaro, the dethroned queen of Cyprus.

      A letter addressed to Mrs. FitzGerald, October 8, 1889, is in part a fitting sequel to that which he had written to her from the same spot, eleven years before.

      ‘… Fortunately there is little changed here: my old Albergo, — ruinous with earthquake — is down and done with — but few novelties are observable — except the regrettable one that the silk industry has been transported elsewhere — to Cornuda and other places nearer the main railway. No more Pippas — at least of the silk-winding sort!

      ‘But the pretty type is far from extinct.

      ‘Autumn is beginning to paint the foliage, but thin it as well; and the sea of fertility all round our height, which a month ago showed pomegranates and figs and chestnuts, — walnuts and apples all rioting together in full glory, — all this is daily disappearing. I say nothing of the olive and the vine. I find the Turret rather the worse for careful weeding — the hawks which used to build there have been “shot for food” — and the echo is sadly curtailed of its replies; still, things are the same in the main. Shall I ever see them again, when — as I suppose — we leave for Venice in a fortnight? …’

      In the midst of this imaginative delight he carried into his walks the old keen habits of observation. He would peer into the hedges for what living things were to be found there. He would whistle softly to the lizards basking on the low walls which border the roads, to try his old power of attracting them.

      On the 15th of October he wrote to Mrs. Skirrow, after some preliminary description:

      Then — such a view over the whole Lombard plain; not a site in view, or approximate view at least, without its story. Autumn is now painting all the abundance of verdure, — figs, pomegranates, chestnuts, and vines, and I don’t know what else, — all in a wonderful confusion, — and now glowing with all the colours of the rainbow. Some weeks back, the little town was glorified by the visit of a decent theatrical troop who played in a theatre inside the old palace of Queen Catharine Cornaro — utilized also as a prison in which I am informed are at present full five if not six malefactors guilty of stealing grapes, and the like enormities. Well, the troop played for a fortnight together exceedingly well — high tragedy and low comedy — and the stage-box which I occupied cost 16 francs. The theatre had been out of use for six years, for we are out of the way and only a baiting-place for a company pushing on to Venice. In fine, we shall stay here probably for a week or more, — and then proceed to Pen, at the Rezzonico; a month there, and then homewards! …

I delight in finding that the beloved Husband and precious friend manages to do without the old yoke about his neck, and enjoys himself as never anybody had a better right to do. I continue to congratulate him on his emancipation and ourselves on a more frequent enjoyment of his company in consequence.* Give him my true love; take mine, dearest friend, — and my sister’s love to you both goes with it. Ever affectionately yours Robert Browning.

* Mr. Skirrow had just resigned his post of Master in Chancery.

      The cry of ‘homewards!’ now frequently recurs in his letters. We find it in one written a week later to Mr. G. M. Smith, otherwise very expressive of his latest condition of mind and feeling.

      Asolo, Veneto, Italia: Oct. 22, ‘89.

      My dear Smith, — I was indeed delighted to get your letter two days ago — for there are such accidents as the loss of a parcel, even when it has been despatched from so important a place as this city — for a regular city it is, you must know, with all the rights of one, — older far than Rome, being founded by the Euganeans who gave their name to the adjoining hills. ‘Fortified’ is was once, assuredly, and the walls still surround it most picturesquely though mainly in utter ruin, and you even overrate the population, which does not now much exceed 900 souls — in the city Proper, that is — for the territory below and around contains some 10,000. But we are at the very top of things, garlanded about, as it were, with a narrow line of houses, — some palatial, such as you would be glad to see in London, — and above all towers the old dwelling of Queen Cornaro, who was forced to exchange her Kingdom of Cyprus СКАЧАТЬ