Robert Browning — Chapter 5 Part 3

In 1871 also appeared _Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau: Saviour of Society_, one of the finest and most picturesque of all Browning's apologetic monologues.

The figure is, of course, intended for Napoleon III.

, whose Empire had just fallen, bringing down his country with it.

The saying has been often quoted that Louis Napoleon deceived Europe twice--once when he made it think he was a noodle, and once when he made it think he was a statesman.

It might be added that Europe was never quite just to him, and was deceived a third time, when it took him after his fall for an exploded mountebank and nonentity.

Amid the general chorus of contempt which was raised over his weak and unscrupulous policy in later years, culminating in his great disaster, there are few things finer than this attempt of Browning's to give the man a platform and let him speak for himself.

It is the apologia of a political adventurer, and a political adventurer of a kind peculiarly open to popular condemnation.

Mankind has always been somewhat inclined to forgive the adventurer who destroys or re-creates, but there is nothing inspiring about the adventurer who merely preserves.

We have sympathy with the rebel who aims at reconstruction, but there is something repugnant to the imagination in the rebel who rebels in the name of compromise.

Browning had to defend, or rather to interpret, a man who kidnapped politicians in the night and deluged the Montmartre with blood, not for an ideal, not for a reform, not precisely even for a cause, but simply for the establishment of a _régime_.

He did these hideous things not so much that he might be able to do better ones, but that he and every one else might be able to do nothing for twenty years; and Browning's contention, and a very plausible contention, is that the criminal believed that his crime would establish order and compromise, or, in other words, that he thought that nothing was the very best thing he and his people could do.

There is something peculiarly characteristic of Browning in thus selecting not only a political villain, but what would appear the most prosaic kind of villain.

We scarcely ever find in Browning a defence of those obvious and easily defended publicans and sinners whose mingled virtues and vices are the stuff of romance and melodrama--the generous rake, the kindly drunkard, the strong man too great for parochial morals.

He was in a yet more solitary sense the friend of the outcast.

He took in the sinners whom even sinners cast out.

He went with the hypocrite and had mercy on the Pharisee.

How little this desire of Browning's, to look for a moment at the man's life with the man's eyes, was understood, may be gathered from the criticisms on _Hohenstiel-Schwangau_, which, says Browning, "the Editor of the _Edinburgh Review_ calls my eulogium on the Second Empire, which it is not, any more than what another wiseacre affirms it to be, a scandalous attack on the old constant friend of England.

It is just what I imagine the man might, if he pleased, say for himself."

In 1873 appeared _Red-Cotton Night-Cap Country_, which, if it be not absolutely one of the finest of Browning's poems, is certainly one of the most magnificently Browningesque.

The origin of the name of the poem is probably well known.

He was travelling along the Normandy coast, and discovered what he called "Meek, hitherto un-Murrayed bathing-places, Best loved of sea-coast-nook-full Normandy!"

Miss Thackeray, who was of the party, delighted Browning beyond measure by calling the sleepy old fishing district "White Cotton Night-Cap Country."

It was exactly the kind of elfish phrase to which Browning had, it must always be remembered, a quite unconquerable attraction.

The notion of a town of sleep, where men and women walked about in nightcaps, a nation of somnambulists, was the kind of thing that Browning in his heart loved better than _Paradise Lost_.

Some time afterwards he read in a newspaper a very painful story of profligacy and suicide which greatly occupied the French journals in the year 1871, and which had taken place in the same district.

It is worth noting that Browning was one of those wise men who can perceive the terrible and impressive poetry of the police-news, which is commonly treated as vulgarity, which is dreadful and may be undesirable, but is certainly not vulgar.

From _The Ring and the Book_ to _Red-Cotton Night-Cap Country_ a great many of his works might be called magnificent detective stories.

The story is somewhat ugly, and its power does not alter its ugliness, for power can only make ugliness uglier.

And in this poem there is little or nothing of the revelation of that secret wealth of valour and patience in humanity which makes real and redeems the revelation of its secret vileness in _The Ring and the Book_.

It almost looks at first sight as if Browning had for a moment surrendered the whole of his impregnable philosophical position and admitted the strange heresy that a human story can be sordid.

But this view of the poem is, of course, a mistake.

It was written in something which, for want of a more exact word, we must call one of the bitter moods of Browning; but the bitterness is entirely the product of a certain generous hostility against the class of morbidities which he really detested, sometimes more than they deserved.

In this poem these principles of weakness and evil are embodied to him as the sicklier kind of Romanism, and the more sensual side of the French temperament.

We must never forget what a great deal of the Puritan there remained in Browning to the end.

This outburst of it is fierce and ironical, not in his best spirit.

It says in effect, "You call this a country of sleep, I call it a country of death.

You call it 'White Cotton Night-Cap Country'; I call it 'Red Cotton Night-Cap Country.'

" Shortly before this, in 1872, he had published _Fifine at the Fair_, which his principal biographer, and one of his most uncompromising admirers, calls a piece of perplexing cynicism.

Perplexing it may be to some extent, for it was almost impossible to tell whether Browning would or would not be perplexing even in a love-song or a post-card.

But cynicism is a word that cannot possibly be applied with any propriety to anything that Browning ever wrote.

Cynicism denotes that condition of mind in which we hold that life is in its nature mean and arid; that no soul contains genuine goodness, and no state of things genuine reliability.

_Fifine at the Fair_, like _Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau_, is one of Browning's apologetic soliloquies--the soliloquy of an epicurean who seeks half-playfully to justify upon moral grounds an infidelity into which he afterwards actually falls.

This casuist, like all Browning's casuists, is given many noble outbursts and sincere moments, and therefore apparently the poem is called cynical.

It is difficult to understand what particular connection there is between seeing good in nobody and seeing good even in a sensual fool.

After _Fifine at the Fair_ appeared the _Inn Album_, in 1875, a purely narrative work, chiefly interesting as exhibiting in yet another place one of Browning's vital characteristics, a pleasure in retelling and interpreting actual events of a sinister and criminal type; and after the _Inn Album_ came what is perhaps the most preposterously individual thing he ever wrote, _Of Pacchiarotto, and How He Worked in Distemper_, in 1876. It is impossible to call the work poetry, and it is very difficult indeed to know what to call it.

Its chief characteristic is a kind of galloping energy, an energy that has nothing intellectual or even intelligible about it, a purely animal energy of words.

Not only is it not beautiful, it is not even clever, and yet it carries the reader away as he might be carried away by romping children.

It ends up with a voluble and largely unmeaning malediction upon the poet's critics, a malediction so outrageously good-humoured that it does not take the trouble even to make itself clear to the objects of its wrath.

One can compare the poem to nothing in heaven or earth, except to the somewhat humorous, more or less benevolent, and most incomprehensible catalogues of curses and oaths which may be heard from an intoxicated navvy.

This is the kind of thing, and it goes on for pages:-- "Long after the last of your number Has ceased my front-court to encumber While, treading down rose and ranunculus, You _Tommy-make-room-for-your-uncle_-us!

Troop, all of you man or homunculus, Quick march!

for Xanthippe, my housemaid, If once on your pates she a souse made With what, pan or pot, bowl or _skoramis_, First comes to her hand--things were more amiss!

I would not for worlds be your place in-- Recipient of slops from the basin!

You, Jack-in-the-Green, leaf-and-twiggishness Won't save a dry thread on your priggishness!"

You can only call this, in the most literal sense of the word, the brute-force of language.

In spite however of this monstrosity among poems, which gives its title to the volume, it contains some of the most beautiful verses that Browning ever wrote in that style of light philosophy in which he was unequalled.

Nothing ever gave so perfectly and artistically what is too loosely talked about as a thrill, as the poem called "Fears and Scruples," in which a man describes the mystifying conduct of an absent friend, and reserves to the last line the climax-- "Hush, I pray you!

What if this friend happen to be--God."

It is the masterpiece of that excellent but much-abused literary quality, Sensationalism.

The volume entitled _Pacchiarotto_, moreover, includes one or two of the most spirited poems on the subject of the poet in relation to publicity--"At the Mermaid," "House," and "Shop."

In spite of his increasing years, his books seemed if anything to come thicker and faster.

Two were published in 1878--_La Saisiaz_, his great metaphysical poem on the conception of immortality, and that delightfully foppish fragment of the _ancien régime_, _The Two Poets of Croisic_.

Those two poems would alone suffice to show that he had not forgotten the hard science of theology or the harder science of humour.

Another collection followed in 1879, the first series of _Dramatic Idylls_, which contain such masterpieces as "Pheidippides" and "Ivàn Ivànovitch."

Upon its heels, in 1880, came the second series of _Dramatic Idylls_, including "Muléykeh" and "Clive," possibly the two best stories in poetry, told in the best manner of story-telling.

Then only did the marvellous fountain begin to slacken in quantity, but never in quality.

_Jocoseria_ did not appear till 1883. It contains among other things a cast-back to his very earliest manner in the lyric of "Never the Time and the Place," which we may call the most light-hearted love-song that was ever written by a man over seventy.

In the next year appeared _Ferishtah's Fancies_, which exhibit some of his shrewdest cosmic sagacity, expressed in some of his quaintest and most characteristic images.

Here perhaps more than anywhere else we see that supreme peculiarity of Browning--his sense of the symbolism of material trifles.

Enormous problems, and yet more enormous answers, about pain, prayer, destiny, liberty, and conscience are suggested by cherries, by the sun, by a melon-seller, by an eagle flying in the sky, by a man tilling a plot of ground.

It is this spirit of grotesque allegory which really characterises Browning among all other poets.

Other poets might possibly have hit upon the same philosophical idea--some idea as deep, as delicate, and as spiritual.

But it may be safely asserted that no other poet, having thought of a deep, delicate, and spiritual idea, would call it "A Bean Stripe; also Apple Eating."

Three more years passed, and the last book which Browning published in his lifetime was _Parleyings with Certain People of Importance in their Day_, a book which consists of apostrophes, amicable, furious, reverential, satirical, emotional to a number of people of whom the vast majority even of cultivated people have never heard in their lives--Daniel Bartoli, Francis Furini, Gerard de Lairesse, and Charles Avison.

This extraordinary knowledge of the fulness of history was a thing which never ceased to characterise Browning even when he was unfortunate in every other literary quality.

Apart altogether from every line he ever wrote, it may fairly be said that no mind so rich as his ever carried its treasures to the grave.

All these later poems are vigorous, learned, and full-blooded.

They are thoroughly characteristic of their author.

But nothing in them is quite so characteristic of their author as this fact, that when he had published all of them, and was already near to his last day, he turned with the energy of a boy let out of school, and began, of all things in the world, to re-write and improve "Pauline," the boyish poem that he had written fifty-five years before.

Here was a man covered with glory and near to the doors of death, who was prepared to give himself the elaborate trouble of reconstructing the mood, and rebuilding the verses of a long juvenile poem which had been forgotten for fifty years in the blaze of successive victories.

It is such things as these which give to Browning an interest of personality which is far beyond the more interest of genius.

It was of such things that Elizabeth Barrett wrote in one of her best moments of insight--that his genius was the least important thing about him.

During all these later years, Browning's life had been a quiet and regular one.

He always spent the winter in Italy and the summer in London, and carried his old love of precision to the extent of never failing day after day throughout the year to leave the house at the same time.

He had by this time become far more of a public figure than he had ever been previously, both in England and Italy.

In 1881, Dr. Furnivall and Miss E. H.

Hickey founded the famous "Browning Society."

He became President of the new "Shakespeare Society" and of the "Wordsworth Society."

In 1886, on the death of Lord Houghton, he accepted the post of Foreign Correspondent to the Royal Academy.

When he moved to De Vere Gardens in 1887, it began to be evident that he was slowly breaking up.

He still dined out constantly; he still attended every reception and private view; he still corresponded prodigiously, and even added to his correspondence; and there is nothing more typical of him than that now, when he was almost already a classic, he answered any compliment with the most delightful vanity and embarrassment.

In a letter to Mr. George Bainton, touching style, he makes a remark which is an excellent criticism on his whole literary career: "I myself found many forgotten fields which have proved the richest of pastures."

But despite his continued energy, his health was gradually growing worse.

He was a strong man in a muscular, and ordinarily in a physical sense, but he was also in a certain sense a nervous man, and may be said to have died of brain-excitement prolonged through a lifetime.

In these closing years he began to feel more constantly the necessity for rest.

He and his sister went to live at a little hotel in Llangollen, and spent hours together talking and drinking tea on the lawn.

He himself writes in one of his quaint and poetic phrases that he had come to love these long country retreats, "another term of delightful weeks, each tipped with a sweet starry Sunday at the little church."

For the first time, and in the last two or three years, he was really growing old.

On one point he maintained always a tranquil and unvarying decision.

The pessimistic school of poetry was growing up all round him; the decadents, with their belief that art was only a counting of the autumn leaves, were approaching more and more towards their tired triumph and their tasteless popularity.

But Browning would not for one instant take the scorn of them out of his voice.

"Death, death, it is this harping on death that I despise so much.

In fiction, in poetry, French as well as English, and I am told in American also, in art and literature, the shadow of death, call it what you will, despair, negation, indifference, is upon us.

But what fools who talk thus!

Why, _amico mio_, you know as well as I, that death is life, just as our daily momentarily dying body is none the less alive, and ever recruiting new forces of existence.

Without death, which is our church-yardy crape-like word for change, for growth, there could be no prolongation of that which we call life.

Never say of me that I am dead."

On August 13, 1888, he set out once more for Italy, the last of his innumerable voyages.

During his last Italian period he seems to have fallen back on very ultimate simplicities, chiefly a mere staring at nature.

The family with whom he lived kept a fox cub, and Browning would spend hours with it watching its grotesque ways; when it escaped, he was characteristically enough delighted.

The old man could be seen continually in the lanes round Asolo, peering into hedges and whistling for the lizards.

This serene and pastoral decline, surely the mildest of slopes into death, was suddenly diversified by a flash of something lying far below.

Browning's eye fell upon a passage written by the distinguished Edward Fitzgerald, who had been dead for many years, in which Fitzgerald spoke in an uncomplimentary manner of Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

Browning immediately wrote the "Lines to Edward Fitzgerald," and set the whole literary world in an uproar.

The lines were bitter and excessive to have been written against any man, especially bitter and excessive to have been written against a man who was not alive to reply.

And yet, when all is said, it is impossible not to feel a certain dark and indescribable pleasure in this last burst of the old barbaric energy.

The mountain had been tilled and forested, and laid out in gardens to the summit; but for one last night it had proved itself once more a volcano, and had lit up all the plains with its forgotten fire.

And the blow, savage as it was, was dealt for that great central sanctity--the story of a man's youth.

All that the old man would say in reply to every view of the question was, "I felt as if she had died yesterday."

Towards December of 1889 he moved to Venice, where he fell ill.

He took very little food; it was indeed one of his peculiar small fads that men should not take food when they are ill, a matter in which he maintained that the animals were more sagacious.

He asserted vigorously that this somewhat singular regimen would pull him through, talked about his plans, and appeared cheerful.

Gradually, however, the talking became more infrequent, the cheerfulness passed into a kind of placidity; and without any particular crisis or sign of the end, Robert Browning died on December 12, 1889. The body was taken on board ship by the Venice Municipal Guard, and received by the Royal Italian marines.

He was buried in the Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey, the choir singing his wife's poem, "He giveth His beloved sleep."

On the day that he died _Asolando_ was published.

CHAPTER VI