The Complete Works of Robert Browning: Poems, Plays, Letters & Biographies in One Edition. Robert Browning
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Название: The Complete Works of Robert Browning: Poems, Plays, Letters & Biographies in One Edition
Автор: Robert Browning
Издательство: Bookwire
Жанр: Языкознание
isbn: 9788027230167
isbn:
All her work of these early years is in that same delicate microscopic handwriting of her later life. She laughingly professed a theory that “an immense amount of physical energy must go to the making of those immense, sweeping hand-writings achieved by some persons.” She instanced that of Landor, “who writes as if he had the sky for a copy-book and dotted his i’s in proportion.”
Poetry as a serious art was the most earnest object in the life of Elizabeth Barrett. To her poetry meant “life in life.”
“Art’s a service,—mark.”
The poetic vocation could hardly be said to be so much a conscious and definite choice with her as a predetermined destiny, and still it was both. The possibility of not being a poet could never have occurred to her. There could have been as little question of Beethoven’s being other than a musician or of Raphael as being other than a painter. In poetry Elizabeth Barrett recognized the most potent form of service; and she held that poetic art existed for the sake of human co-operation with the Divine purposes.
The opening chapters of her life in the lovely seclusion of Hope End closed in 1832 with the removal of the family to Sidmouth in Devonshire. Here they were bestowed in a house which had been occupied by the Grand Duchess Helena. It commanded a splendid sea view, on which four drawing-room windows looked out, and there were green hills and trees behind. They met a few friends,—Sir John Kean, the Herrings,—and the town abounded in green lanes, “some of them quite black with foliage, where it is twilight in the middle of the day, and others letting in beautiful glimpses of the hills and the sunny sea.” Henrietta Barrett took long walks, Elizabeth accompanying her sister, mounted on her donkey. The brothers and sisters were all fond of boating and passed much time on the water. They would row as far as Dawlish, ten miles distant, and back; and after the five o’clock dinner there were not infrequently moonlight excursions on the sea. During these first months at Sidmouth Miss Barrett read Bulwer’s novels, which she asserts “quite delighted” her; as she found in them “all the dramatic talent which Scott has, and all the passion which he has not.” Bulwer seemed to her, also, “a far more profound discriminator of character” than Scott. She read Mrs. Trollope, “that maker of books,” whose work she characterized as not novels but “libels.” She found in Mrs. Trollope “neither the delicacy nor the candor which constitute true nobility of mind,” and thought that her talent formed but “a scanty veil to shadow her other defects.”
Miss Barrett grew to love Sidmouth, with its walks on the seashore; and letters, reading, poetic production, and family interests filled the time. Here, too, she found time to enter on a task dear to her, the translation of the “Prometheus Bound” of Æschylus.
Some years later, however, she entirely revised this early translation, of which she wrote to Hugh Stuart Boyd that it was “as cold as Caucasus, and flat as the neighboring plain,” and that “a palinodia, a recantation,” was necessary to her. In her preface to the later translation she begged that her reader would forgive her English for not being Greek, and herself for not being Æschylus.
CHAPTER III
1833-1841
“... I press God’s lamp
Close to my breast; its splendor, soon or late,
Will pierce the gloom; I shall emerge one day.”
Browning Visits Russia—“Paracelsus”—Recognition of Wordsworth and Landor—“Strafford”—First Visit to Italy—Mrs. Carlyle’s Baffled Reading of “Sordello”—Lofty Motif of the Poem—The Universal Problem of Life—Enthusiasm for Italy—The Sibylline Leaves Yet To Unfold.
From Camberwell to St. Petersburg was somewhat of a transition. This was Mr. Browning’s initial excursion into a wider world of realities, as distinguished from that mirage which rises in the world of dreams and mental nebulæ. “To know the universe itself as a road,—as many roads,” is the way in which the beckoning future prefigures itself to the artist temperament.
“All around him Patmos lies
Who hath spirit-gifted eyes.”
The eyes thus touched with the chrism of poetic art see the invisible which is peopled with forms unseen to others, and which offers a panorama of living drama. It is the poet who overhears the “talk of the gods,” and when he shall report
“Some random word they say,”
he becomes
“... the fated man of men
Whom the ages must obey.”
This was the undreamed destiny hovering over the young poet, luring him on like a guiding cloud which became a pillar of fire by night.
Among his London friends was the Chevalier George de Benkhausen, the Russian Consul-General, who, being suddenly summoned to Russia on some secret mission of state, invited Browning to accompany him. Browning went “nominally in the character of secretary,” Mrs. Orr says, and they fared forth on March 1, by steamer to Rotterdam, and then journeyed more than fifteen hundred miles by diligence, drawn by relays of galloping horses. The expedition was to Browning a rich mine of poetic material. The experience sank into the subconsciousness as seed to await fruition. In his “Ivan Ivanovitch,” where is seen
“This highway broad and straight e’en from the Neva’s mouth
To Moscow’s gates of gold,”
and in which the unending pine forests rising from the snow-covered ground are so vividly pictured; and in “Colombe’s Birthday,” where is seen the region of the heroine,—
“Castle Ravestein—
That sleeps out trustfully its extreme age
On the Meuse’ quiet bank, where she lived queen
Over the water-buds,...”
and the place
“... when he hid his child
Among the river-flowers at Ravestein,”
it can be seen how all this country impressed his imagination. Professor Hall Griffin finds in the fifth book of “Sordello” an unmistakable description of the most famous and oldest portrait of Charlemagne, which hangs in the Council Hall of the Rath-haus, in Aix, which Mr. Browning saw on this trip. During these three months he saw something of Russian society, and on the breaking up of the ice in the Neva in spring, witnessed the annual ceremony of the Czar’s drinking the first glass of water from it. Much of the gorgeous, barbaric splendor of Russian fairs and booths, “with droshkies and fish-pies” on the one hand, and stately palaces on the other, haunted him, and reflected themselves in several of his poems. Especially did the Russian music and strains of folk-song linger in his memory for all the after years.
On his return from Russia СКАЧАТЬ