Life of Robert Browning. Sharp William

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СКАЧАТЬ When I heard he was a painter I insisted on calling on him, though he declared he had nothing to show me--which was far enough from the case. Subsequently, on another of my returns to London, he painted my portrait, not, I fancy, in oils, but water-colours, and finished it in Paris shortly after. This must have been in the year when Tennyson published 'Maud,' for I remember Tennyson reading the poem one evening while Rossetti made a rapid pen-and-ink sketch of him, very good, from one obscure corner of vantage, which I still possess, and duly value. This was before Rossetti's marriage."[8]

[8] The highly interesting and excellent portrait of Browning here alluded to has never been exhibited.

      As a matter of fact, as recorded on the back of the original drawing, the eventful reading took place at 13 Dorset Street, Portman Square, on the 27th of September 1855, and those present, besides the Poet-Laureate, Browning, and Rossetti, were Mrs. E. Barrett Browning and Miss Arabella Barrett.

      When, a year or two ago, the poet learned that a copy of his first work, which in 1833 could not find a dozen purchasers at a few shillings, went at a public sale for twenty-five guineas, he remarked that had his dear old aunt been living he could have returned to her, much to her incredulous astonishment, no doubt, he smilingly averred, the cost of the book's publication, less £3 15s. It was about the time of the publication of "Pauline" that Browning began to see something of the literary and artistic life for which he had such an inborn taste. For a brief period he went often to the British Museum, particularly the Library, and to the National Gallery. At the British Museum Reading Room he perused with great industry and research those works in philosophy and medical history which are the bases of "Paracelsus," and those Italian Records bearing upon the story of Sordello. Residence in Camberwell, in 1833, rendered night engagements often impracticable: but nevertheless he managed to mix a good deal in congenial society. It is not commonly known that he was familiar to these early associates as a musician and artist rather than as a poet. Among them, and they comprised many well-known workers in the several arts, were Charles Dickens and "Ion" Talfourd. Mr. Fox, whom Browning had met once or twice in his early youth, after the former had been shown the Byronic verses which had in one way gratified and in another way perturbed the poet's father, saw something more of his young friend after the publication of "Pauline." He very kindly offered to print in his magazine any short poems the author of that book should see fit to send--an offer, however, which was not put to the test for some time.

      Practically simultaneously with the publication of "Pauline" appeared another small volume, containing the "Palace of Art," "Oenone," "Mariana," etc. Those early books of Tennyson and Browning have frequently, and somewhat uncritically, been contrasted. Unquestionably, however, the elder poet showed a consummate and continuous mastery of his art altogether beyond the intermittent expressional power of Browning in his most rhythmic emotion at any time of his life. To affirm that there is more intellectual fibre, what Rossetti called fundamental brain-work, in the product of the younger poet, would be beside the mark. The insistence on the supremacy of Browning over all poets since Shakspere because he has the highest "message" to deliver, because his intellect is the most subtle and comprehensive, because his poems have this or that dynamic effect upon dormant or sluggish or other active minds, is to be seriously and energetically deprecated. It is with presentment that the artist has, fundamentally, to concern himself. If he cannot present poetically then he is not, in effect, a poet, though he may be a poetic thinker, or a great writer. Browning's eminence is not because of his detachment from what some one has foolishly called "the mere handiwork, the furnisher's business, of the poet." It is the delight of the true artist that the product of his talent should be wrought to a high technique equally by the shaping brain and the dexterous hand. Browning is great because of his formative energy: because, despite the excess of burning and compulsive thought--

      "Thoughts swarming thro' the myriad-chambered brain

       Like multitudes of bees i' the innumerous cells,

       Each staggering 'neath the undelivered freight ----"

      he strikes from the furor of words an electric flash so transcendently illuminative that what is commonplace becomes radiant with that light which dwells not in nature, but only in the visionary eye of man. Form for the mere beauty of form, is a playing with the wind, the acceptance of a shadow for the substance. If nothing animate it, it may possibly be fair of aspect, but only as the frozen smile upon a dead face.

      We know little of Browning's inner or outer life in 1833 and 1834. It was a secretive, not a productive period. One by one certain pinnacles of his fair snow-mountain of Titanic aim melted away. He began to realise the first disenchantment of the artist: the sense of dreams never to be accomplished. That land of the great unwritten poems, the great unpainted pictures: what a heritance there for the enfranchised spirits of great dreamers!

      In the autumn of 1833 he went forth to his University, that of the world of men and women. It was ever a favourite answer of his, when asked if he had been at either Oxford or Cambridge,--"Italy was my University."

      But first he went to Russia, and spent some time in St. Petersburg, attracted thither by the invitation of a friend. The country interested him, but does not seem to have deeply or permanently engaged his attention. That, however, his Russian experiences were not fruitless is manifest from the remarkably picturesque and technically very interesting poem, "Ivàn Ivànovitch" (the fourth of the Dramatic Idyls, 1879). Of a truth, after his own race and country--readers will at once think of "Home Thoughts from the Sea," or the thrilling lines in "Home Thoughts from Abroad," beginning--

      "Oh, to be in England,

       Now that April's there!"--

      or perhaps, those lines in his earliest work--

      "I cherish most

       My love of England--how, her name, a word

       Of hers in a strange tongue makes my heart beat!"

      --it was of the mystic Orient or of the glowing South that he oftenest thought and dreamed. With Heine he might have cried: "O Firdusi! O Ischami! O Saadi! How do I long after the roses of Schiraz!" As for Italy, who of all our truest poets has not loved her: but who has worshipped her with so manly a passion, so loyal a love, as Browning? One alone indeed may be mated with him here, she who had his heart of hearts, and who lies at rest in the old Florentine cemetery within sound of the loved waters of Arno. Who can forget his lines in "De Gustibus," "Open my heart and you will see, graved inside of it, Italy."

      It would be no difficult task to devote a volume larger than the present one to the descriptive analysis of none but the poems inspired by Italy, Italian personages and history, Italian Painting, Sculpture, Architecture, and Music. From Porphyria and her lover to Pompilia and all the direful Roman tragedy wherein she is as a moon of beauty above conflicting savage tides of passion, what an unparalleled gallery of portraits, what a brilliant phantasmagoria, what a movement of intensest life!

      It is pleasant to know of one of them, "The Italian in England," that Browning was proud, because Mazzini told him he had read this poem to certain of his fellow-exiles in England to show how an Englishman could sympathise with them.

      After leaving Russia the young poet spent the rest of his Wanderjahr in Italy. Among other places he visited was Asolo, that white little hill-town of the Veneto, whence he drew hints for "Sordello," and "Pippa Passes," and whither he returned in the last year of his life, as with unconscious significance he himself said, "on his way homeward."

      In the summer of 1834, that is, when he was in his twenty-second year, he returned to Camberwell. "Sordello" he had in some fashion begun, but had set aside for a poem which occupied him throughout СКАЧАТЬ