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

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СКАЧАТЬ opens the golden door of literary stimulus. Books are to the mind as is food to the body. Emerson declares that the poet is the only teller of news, and Mrs. Browning pronounced poets as

      “The only truth-tellers now left to God.”

      Familiarity with noble thought and beautiful expression influences the subconscious nature to an incalculable degree, and leads “the spirit finely touched” on “to all fine issues.”

      Browning lived in this stimulating atmosphere. He warmed his hands at the divine fire; and the fact that all this richness of resource stimulated rather than stifled him is greatly to the credit of his real power. Favorable surroundings and circumstances did not serve him as a cushion on which to go to sleep, but rather as the pedestal on which he might climb to loftier altitudes. It was no lotus-eating experience into which the lad was lulled, but the vital activity of the life of creative thought. The Heavenly Powers are not invariably, even if frequently, sought in sorrow only, and in the mournful midnight hours. There are natures that grow by affluence as well as by privation, and that develop their best powers in sunshine.

      “Even in a palace life can be well lived,” said Marcus Aurelius. The spirit formed to dwell in the starry spaces is not allured to the mere enjoyment of the senses, even when material comfort and intellectual luxuries may abound. Not that the modest abundance of the elder Browning’s books and pictures could take rank as intellectual luxury. It was stimulus, not satiety, that these suggested.

Pictures and painters had their part, too, in the unconscious culture that surrounded the future poet. London in that day afforded little of what would be called art; the National Gallery was not opened until Browning was in his young manhood; the Tate and other modern galleries were then undreamed of. But, to the appropriating temperament, one picture may do more than a city full of galleries might for another, and to the small collection of some three or four hundred paintings in the Dulwich Gallery, Browning was indebted for great enjoyment, and for the art that fostered his sympathetic appreciation. In after years he referred to his gratitude for being allowed its privileges when under the age (fourteen) at which these were supposed to be granted. Small as was the collection, it was representative of the Italian and Spanish, the French and the Dutch schools, as well as of the English, and the boy would fix on some one picture and sit before it for an hour, lost in its suggestion. It was the more imaginative art that enchained him. In later years, speaking of these experiences in a letter to Miss Barrett, he wrote of his ecstatic contemplation of “those two Guidos, the wonderful Rembrandt’s ‘Jacob’s Vision,’ such a Watteau....” An old engraving from Correggio, in his father’s home, was one of the sources of inspiration of Browning’s boyhood. The story fascinated him; he never tired of asking his father to repeat it, and something of its truth so penetrated into his consciousness that in later years he had the old print hung in his room that it might be before him as he wrote. It became to him, perhaps, one of

      “the unshaped images that lie

       Within my mind’s cave.”

      The profound significance of the picture evidently haunted him, as is made evident by a passage in “Pauline” that opens:

“But I must never grieve whom wing can waft Far from such thoughts—as now. Andromeda! And she is with me; years roll, I shall change, But change can touch her not—so beautiful With her fixed eyes....”

      Is there gained another glimpse of Browning’s boyhood in those lines in “Pauline”?:

      “I am made up of an intensest life,

       Of a most clear idea of consciousness

       Of self, distinct from all its qualities,

       From all affections, passions, feelings, powers.”

      The various and complex impressions, influences, and shaping factors of destiny that any biographer discerns in the formative years of his subject are as indecipherable as a palimpsest, and as little to be classified as the contents of Pandora’s box; nor is it on record that the man himself can look into his own history and rightly appraise the relative values of these. Nothing, certainly, could be more remote from the truth than the reading of autobiographic significance into any stray line a poet may write; for imagination is frequently more real than reality. Yet many of the creations of after life may trace their germination to some incident or impression. William Sharp offers a beautiful and interesting instance of one of these when he ascribes the entrancing fantasy of “The Flight of the Duchess” to a suggestion made on the poet’s mind as a child on a Guy Fawkes day, when he followed across the fields a woman singing a strange song, whose refrain was: “Following the Queen of the Gypsies, O!” The haunting line took root in his memory and found its inflorescence in that memorable poem.

It was not conducive to poetic fancy when the lad was placed in the school of a Mr. Ready, at Peckham, where he solaced himself for the rules and regulations which he abhorred by writing little plays, and persuading his school-fellows to act in them with him.

      Browning’s first excursion into Shelley’s poems, brought home to him one night as a gift from his mother, was in one of the enchanting evenings of May; where, at the open window by which he sat, there floated in the melody of two nightingales, one in a laburnum, “heavy with its weight of gold,” and the other in a copper-beech, at the opposite side of the garden. Such an hour mirrors itself unconsciously in a poet’s memory, and affords, in future years, “such stuff as dreams are made of.”

      Byron, who, as Mazzini says, “led the genius of Britain on a pilgrimage throughout all Europe,” stamped an impress upon the youthful Browning that may be traced throughout his entire life. There was something in the genius of Byron that acted as an enormous force on the nature in response to it, that transformed nebulous and floating ideals and imaginings into hope and resolution, that burned away barriers and revealed truth. By its very nature influence is determined as much by the receiver as by the inspirer, and if a light is applied to a torch, the torch, too, must be prepared to ignite, or there will be no blaze.

      “A deft musician does the breeze become

       Whenever an Æolian harp it finds;

       Hornpipe and hurdygurdy both are dumb

       Unto the most musicianly of winds.”

      The fire of Byron, the spirituality of Shelley, illuminated that world of drift and dream in which Robert Browning dwelt; and while Shelley, with his finer spirit, his glorious, impassioned imagination,

      “A creature of impetuous breath,”

incited poetic ardors and unmeasured rapture of vision, Byron penetrated his soul with a certain effective energy that awakened in him creative power. The spell of Shelley’s poetry acted upon Browning as a vision revealed of beauty and radiance. For Shelley himself, who, as Tennyson said, “did yet give the world another heart and new pulses,” Browning’s feeling was even more intense.

      In the analysis of Shelley’s poetic nature Browning offers the critical reader a key to his own. He asserts that it is the presence of the highest faculty, even though less developed, that gives rank to nature, rather than a lower faculty more developed. Although it was in later years that the impression Shelley made upon his boyhood found adequate expression in his noted essay, the spell reflected itself in “Pauline,” and is to be distinctly traced in many of his poems throughout his entire life. He was aware from the first of that peculiarly kindling quality in Shelley, the flash of life in his work:

      “He spurreth men, he quickeneth

       To splendid strife.”

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