The acquiescent tendency arose in some degree from two equally prominent characteristics of Mr. Browning's nature: his optimism, and his belief in direct Providence; and these again represented a condition of mind which was in certain respects a quality, but must in others be recognized as a defect. It disposed him too much to make a virtue of happiness. It tended also to the ignoring or denying of many incidental possibilities, and many standing problems of human suffering. The first part of this assertion is illustrated by 'The Two Poets of Croisic', in which Mr. Browning declares that, other conditions being equal, the greater poet will have been he who led the happier life, who most completely—and we must take this in the human as well as religious sense—triumphed over suffering. The second has its proof in the contempt for poetic melancholy which flashes from the supposed utterance of Shakespeare in 'At the Mermaid'; its negative justification in the whole range of his work.

Such facts may be hard to reconcile with others already known of Mr. Browning's nature, or already stated concerning it; but it is in the depths of that nature that the solution of this, as of more than one other anomaly, must be sought. It is true that remembered pain dwelt longer with him than remembered pleasure. It is true that the last great sorrow of his life was long felt and cherished by him as a religion, and that it entered as such into the courage with which he first confronted it. It is no less true that he directly and increasingly cultivated happiness; and that because of certain sufferings which had been connected with them, he would often have refused to live his happiest days again.

It seems still harder to associate defective human sympathy with his kind heart and large dramatic imagination, though that very imagination was an important factor in the case. It forbade the collective and mathematical estimate of human suffering, which is so much in favour with modern philanthropy, and so untrue a measure for the individual life; and he indirectly condemns it in 'Ferishtah's Fancies' in the parable of 'Bean Stripes'. But his dominant individuality also barred the recognition of any judgment or impression, any thought or feeling, which did not justify itself from his own point of view. The barrier would melt under the influence of a sympathetic mood, as it would stiffen in the atmosphere of disagreement. It would yield, as did in his case so many other things, to continued indirect pressure, whether from his love of justice, the strength of his attachments, or his power of imaginative absorption. But he was bound by the conditions of an essentially creative nature. The subjectiveness, if I may for once use that hackneyed word, had passed out of his work only to root itself more strongly in his life. He was self-centred, as the creative nature must inevitably be. He appeared, for this reason, more widely sympathetic in his works than in his life, though even in the former certain grounds of vicarious feeling remained untouched. The sympathy there displayed was creative and obeyed its own law. That which was demanded from him by reality was responsive, and implied submission to the law of other minds.

Such intellectual egotism is unconnected with moral selfishness, though it often unconsciously does its work. Were it otherwise, I should have passed over in silence this aspect, comprehensive though it is, of Mr. Browning's character. He was capable of the largest self-sacrifice and of the smallest self-denial; and would exercise either whenever love or duty clearly pointed the way. He would, he believed, cheerfully have done so at the command, however arbitrary, of a Higher Power; he often spoke of the absence of such injunction, whether to endurance or action, as the great theoretical difficulty of life for those who, like himself, rejected or questioned the dogmatic teachings of Christianity. This does not mean that he ignored the traditional moralities which have so largely taken their place. They coincided in great measure with his own instincts; and few occasions could have arisen in which they would not be to him a sufficient guide. I may add, though this is a digression, that he never admitted the right of genius to defy them; when such a right had once been claimed for it in his presence, he rejoined quickly, 'That is an error! noblesse oblige.' But he had difficulty in acknowledging any abstract law which did not derive from a Higher Power; and this fact may have been at once cause and consequence of the special conditions of his own mind. All human or conventional obligation appeals finally to the individual judgment; and in his case this could easily be obscured by the always militant imagination, in regard to any subject in which his feelings were even indirectly concerned. No one saw more justly than he, when the object of vision was general or remote. Whatever entered his personal atmosphere encountered a refracting medium in which objects were decomposed, and a succession of details, each held as it were close to the eye, blocked out the larger view.

We have seen, on the other hand, that he accepted imperfect knowledge as part of the discipline of experience. It detracted in no sense from his conviction of direct relations with the Creator. This was indeed the central fact of his theology, as the absolute individual existence had been the central fact of his metaphysics; and when he described the fatal leap in 'Red Cotton Nightcap Country' as a frantic appeal to the Higher Powers for the 'sign' which the man's religion did not afford, and his nature could not supply, a special dramatic sympathy was at work within him. The third part of the epilogue to 'Dramatis Personae' represented his own creed; though this was often accentuated in the sense of a more personal privilege, and a perhaps less poetic mystery, than the poem conveys. The Evangelical Christian and the subjective idealist philosopher were curiously blended in his composition.

The transition seems violent from this old-world religion to any system of politics applicable to the present day. They were, nevertheless, closely allied in Mr. Browning's mind. His politics were, so far as they went, the practical aspect of his religion. Their cardinal doctrine was the liberty of individual growth; removal of every barrier of prejudice or convention by which it might still be checked. He had been a Radical in youth, and probably in early manhood; he remained, in the truest sense of the word, a Liberal; and his position as such was defined in the sonnet prefixed in 1886 to Mr. Andrew Reid's essay, 'Why I am a Liberal', and bearing the same name. Its profession of faith did not, however, necessarily bind him to any political party. It separated him from all the newest developments of so-called Liberalism. He respected the rights of property. He was a true patriot, hating to see his country plunged into aggressive wars, but tenacious of her position among the empires of the world. He was also a passionate Unionist; although the question of our political relations with Ireland weighed less with him, as it has done with so many others, than those considerations of law and order, of honesty and humanity, which have been trampled under foot in the name of Home Rule. It grieved and surprised him to find himself on this subject at issue with so many valued friends; and no pain of Lost Leadership was ever more angry or more intense, than that which came to him through the defection of a great statesman whom he had honoured and loved, from what he believed to be the right cause.

The character of Mr. Browning's friendships reveals itself in great measure in even a simple outline of his life. His first friends of his own sex were almost exclusively men of letters, by taste if not by profession; the circumstances of his entrance into society made this a matter of course. In later years he associated on cordial terms with men of very various interests and professions; and only writers of conspicuous merit, whether in prose or poetry, attracted him as such. No intercourse was more congenial to him than that of the higher class of English clergymen. He sympathized in their beliefs even when he did not share them. Above all he loved their culture; and the love of culture in general, of its old classic forms in particular, was as strong in him as if it had been formed by all the natural and conventional associations of a university career. He had hearty friends and appreciators among the dignitaries of the Church—successive Archbishops and Bishops, Deans of Westminster and St. Paul's. They all knew the value of the great freelance who fought like the gods of old with the regular army. No name, however, has been mentioned in the poet's family more frequently or with more affection than that of the Rev. J. D. W. Williams, Vicar of Bottisham in Cambridgeshire. The mutual acquaintance, which was made through Mr. Browning's brother-in-law, Mr. George Moulton-Barrett, was prepared by Mr. Williams' great love for his poems, of which he translated many into Latin and Greek; but I am convinced that Mr. Browning's delight in his friend's classical attainments was quite as great as his gratification in the tribute he himself derived from them.

His love of genius was a worship: and in this we must include his whole life. Nor was it, as this feeling so often is, exclusively exercised upon the past. I do not suppose his more eminent contemporaries ever quite knew how generous his enthusiasm for them had been, how free from any under-current of envy, or impulse to avoidable criticism. He could not endure even just censure of one whom he believed, or had believed to be great. I have seen him wince under it, though no third person was present, and heard him answer, 'Don't! don't!' as if physical pain were being inflicted on him. In the early days he would make his friend, M. de Monclar, draw for him from memory the likenesses of famous writers whom he had known in Paris; the sketches thus made of George Sand and Victor Hugo are still in the poet's family. A still more striking and very touching incident refers to one of the winters, probably the second, which he spent in Paris. He was one day walking with little Pen, when Beranger came in sight, and he bade the child 'run up to' or 'run past that gentleman, and put his hand for a moment upon him.' This was a great man, he afterwards explained, and he wished his son to be able by-and-by to say that if he had not known, he had at all events touched him. Scientific genius ranked with him only second to the poetical.

Mr. Browning's delicate professional sympathies justified some sensitiveness on his own account; but he was, I am convinced, as free from this quality as a man with a poet-nature could possibly be. It may seem hazardous to conjecture how serious criticism would have affected him. Few men so much 'reviewed' have experienced so little. He was by turns derided or ignored, enthusiastically praised, zealously analyzed and interpreted: but the independent judgment which could embrace at once the quality of his mind and its defects, is almost absent—has been so at all events during later years—from the volumes which have been written about him. I am convinced, nevertheless, that he would have accepted serious, even adverse criticism, if it had borne the impress of unbiassed thought and genuine sincerity. It could not be otherwise with one in whom the power of reverence was so strongly marked.

He asked but one thing of his reviewers, as he asked but one thing of his larger public. The first demand is indicated in a letter to Mrs. Frank Hill, of January 31, 1884.

Dear Mrs. Hill,—Could you befriend me? The 'Century' prints a little insignificance of mine—an impromptu sonnet—but prints it correctly. The 'Pall Mall' pleases to extract it—and produces what I enclose: one line left out, and a note of admiration (!) turned into an I, and a superfluous 'the' stuck in—all these blunders with the correctly printed text before it! So does the charge of unintelligibility attach itself to your poor friend—who can kick nobody. Robert Browning.

The carelessness often shown in the most friendly quotation could hardly be absent from that which was intended to support a hostile view; and the only injustice of which he ever complained, was what he spoke of as falsely condemning him out of his own mouth. He used to say: 'If a critic declares that any poem of mine is unintelligible, the reader may go to it and judge for himself; but, if it is made to appear unintelligible by a passage extracted from it and distorted by misprints, I have no redress.' He also failed to realize those conditions of thought, and still more of expression, which made him often on first reading difficult to understand; and as the younger generation of his admirers often deny those difficulties where they exist, as emphatically as their grandfathers proclaimed them where they did not, public opinion gave him little help in the matter.

The second (unspoken) request was in some sense an antithesis to the first. Mr. Browning desired to be read accurately but not literally. He deprecated the constant habit of reading him into his work; whether in search of the personal meaning of a given passage or poem, or in the light of a foregone conclusion as to what that meaning must be. The latter process was that generally preferred, because the individual mind naturally seeks its own reflection in the poet's work, as it does in the facts of nature. It was stimulated by the investigations of the Browning Societies, and by the partial familiarity with his actual life which constantly supplied tempting, if untrustworthy clues. It grew out of the strong personal as well as literary interest which he inspired. But the tendency to listen in his work for a single recurrent note always struck him as analogous to the inspection of a picture gallery with eyes blind to every colour but one; and the act of sympathy often involved in this mode of judgment was neutralized for him by the limitation of his genius which it presupposed. His general objection to being identified with his works is set forth in 'At the Mermaid', and other poems of the same volume, in which it takes the form of a rather captious protest against inferring from the poet any habit or quality of the man; and where also, under the impulse of the dramatic mood, he enforces the lesson by saying more than he can possibly mean. His readers might object that his human personality was so often plainly revealed in his poetic utterance (whether or not that of Shakespeare was), and so often also avowed by it, that the line which divided them became impossible to draw. But he again would have rejoined that the Poet could never express himself with any large freedom, unless a fiction of impersonality were granted to him. He might also have alleged, he often did allege, that in his case the fiction would hold a great deal of truth; since, except in the rarest cases, the very fact of poetic, above all of dramatic reproduction, detracts from the reality of the thought or feeling reproduced. It introduces the alloy of fancy without which the fixed outlines of even living experience cannot be welded into poetic form. He claimed, in short, that in judging of his work, one should allow for the action in it of the constructive imagination, in the exercise of which all deeper poetry consists. The form of literalism, which showed itself in seeking historical authority for every character or incident which he employed by way of illustration, was especially irritating to him.

I may (as indeed I must) concede this much, without impugning either the pleasure or the gratitude with which he recognized the increasing interest in his poems, and, if sometimes exhibited in a mistaken form, the growing appreciation of them.

There was another and more striking peculiarity in Mr. Browning's attitude towards his works: his constant conviction that the latest must be the best, because the outcome of the fullest mental experience, and of the longest practice in his art. He was keenly alive to the necessary failings of youthful literary production; he also practically denied to it that quality which so often places it at an advantage over that, not indeed of more mature manhood, but at all events of advancing age. There was much in his own experience to blind him to the natural effects of time; it had been a prolonged triumph over them. But the delusion, in so far as it was one, lay deeper than the testimony of such experience, and would I think have survived it. It was the essence of his belief that the mind is superior to physical change; that it may be helped or hindered by its temporary alliance with the body, but will none the less outstrip it in their joint course; and as intellect was for him the life of poetry, so was the power of poetry independent of bodily progress and bodily decline. This conviction pervaded his life. He learned, though happily very late, to feel age an impediment; he never accepted it as a disqualification.

He finished his work very carefully. He had the better right to resent any garbling of it, that this habitually took place through his punctuation, which was always made with the fullest sense of its significance to any but the baldest style, and of its special importance to his own. I have heard him say: 'People accuse me of not taking pains! I take nothing but pains!' And there was indeed a curious contrast between the irresponsible, often strangely unquestioned, impulse to which the substance of each poem was due, and the conscientious labour which he always devoted to its form. The laborious habit must have grown upon him; it was natural that it should do so as thought gained the ascendency over emotion in what he had to say. Mrs. Browning told Mr. Val Prinsep that her husband 'worked at a great rate;' and this fact probably connected itself with the difficulty he then found in altering the form or wording of any particular phrase; he wrote most frequently under that lyrical inspiration in which the idea and the form are least separable from each other. We know, however, that in the later editions of his old work he always corrected where he could; and if we notice the changed lines in 'Paracelsus' or 'Sordello', as they appear in the edition of 1863, or the slighter alterations indicated for the last reprint of his works, we are struck by the care evinced in them for greater smoothness of expression, as well as for greater accuracy and force.

He produced less rapidly in later life, though he could throw off impromptu verses, whether serious or comical, with the utmost ease. His work was then of a kind which required more deliberation; and other claims had multiplied upon his time and thoughts. He was glad to have accomplished twenty or thirty lines in a morning. After lunch-time, for many years, he avoided, when possible, even answering a note. But he always counted a day lost on which he had not written something; and in those last years on which we have yet to enter, he complained bitterly of the quantity of ephemeral correspondence which kept him back from his proper work. He once wrote, on the occasion of a short illness which confined him to the house, 'All my power of imagination seems gone. I might as well be in bed!' He repeatedly determined to write a poem every day, and once succeeded for a fortnight in doing so. He was then in Paris, preparing 'Men and Women'. 'Childe Roland' and 'Women and Roses' were among those produced on this plan; the latter having been suggested by some flowers sent to his wife. The lyrics in 'Ferishtah's Fancies' were written, I believe, on consecutive days; and the intention renewed itself with his last work, though it cannot have been maintained.

He was not as great a reader in later as in earlier years; he had neither time nor available strength to be so if he had wished; and he absorbed almost unconsciously every item which added itself to the sum of general knowledge. Books had indeed served for him their most important purpose when they had satisfied the first curiosities of his genius, and enabled it to establish its independence. His mind was made up on the chief subjects of contemporary thought, and what was novel or controversial in its proceeding had no attraction for him. He would read anything, short of an English novel, to a friend whose eyes required this assistance; but such pleasure as he derived from the act was more often sympathetic than spontaneous, even when he had not, as he often had, selected for it a book which he already knew. In the course of his last decade he devoted himself for a short time to the study of Spanish and Hebrew. The Spanish dramatists yielded him a fund of new enjoyment; and he delighted in his power of reading Hebrew in its most difficult printed forms. He also tried, but with less result, to improve his knowledge of German. His eyesight defied all obstacles of bad paper and ancient type, and there was anxiety as well as pleasure to those about him in his unfailing confidence in its powers. He never wore spectacles, nor had the least consciousness of requiring them. He would read an old closely printed volume by the waning light of a winter afternoon, positively refusing to use a lamp. Indeed his preference of the faintest natural light to the best that could be artificially produced was perhaps the one suggestion of coming change. He used for all purposes a single eye; for the two did not combine in their action, the right serving exclusively for near, the left for distant objects. This was why in walking he often closed the right eye; while it was indispensable to his comfort in reading, not only that the light should come from the right side, but that the left should be shielded from any luminous object, like the fire, which even at the distance of half the length of a room would strike on his field of vision and confuse the near sight.

His literary interest became increasingly centred on records of the lives of men and women; especially of such men and women as he had known; he was generally curious to see the newly published biographies, though often disappointed by them. He would also read, even for his amusement, good works of French or Italian fiction. His allegiance to Balzac remained unshaken, though he was conscious of lengthiness when he read him aloud. This author's deep and hence often poetic realism was, I believe, bound up with his own earliest aspirations towards dramatic art. His manner of reading aloud a story which he already knew was the counterpart of his own method of construction. He would claim his listener's attention for any apparently unimportant fact which had a part to play in it: he would say: 'Listen to this description: it will be important. Observe this character: you will see a great deal more of him or her.' We know that in his own work nothing was thrown away; no note was struck which did not add its vibration to the general utterance of the poem; and his habitual generosity towards a fellow-worker prompted him to seek and recognize the same quality, even in productions where it was less conspicuous than in his own. The patient reading which he required for himself was justified by that which he always demanded for others; and he claimed it less in his own case for his possible intricacies of thought or style, than for that compactness of living structure in which every detail or group of details was essential to the whole, and in a certain sense contained it. He read few things with so much pleasure as an occasional chapter in the Old Testament.

Mr. Browning was a brilliant talker; he was admittedly more a talker than a conversationalist. But this quality had nothing in common with self-assertion or love of display. He had too much respect for the acquirements of other men to wish to impose silence on those who were competent to speak; and he had great pleasure in listening to a discussion on any subject in which he was interested, and on which he was not specially informed. He never willingly monopolized the conversation; but when called upon to take a prominent part in it, either with one person or with several, the flow of remembered knowledge and revived mental experience, combined with the ingenuous eagerness to vindicate some point in dispute would often carry him away; while his hearers, nearly as often, allowed him to proceed from absence of any desire to interrupt him. This great mental fertility had been prepared by the wide reading and thorough assimilation of his early days; and it was only at a later, and in certain respects less vigorous period, that its full bearing could be seen. His memory for passing occurrences, even such as had impressed him, became very weak; it was so before he had grown really old; and he would urge this fact in deprecation of any want of kindness or sympathy, which a given act of forgetfulness might seem to involve. He had probably always, in matters touching his own life, the memory of feelings more than that of facts. I think this has been described as a peculiarity of the poet-nature; and though this memory is probably the more tenacious of the two, it is no safe guide to the recovery of facts, still less to that of their order and significance. Yet up to the last weeks, even the last conscious days of his life, his remembrance of historical incident, his aptness of literary illustration, never failed him. His dinner-table anecdotes supplied, of course, no measure for this spontaneous reproductive power; yet some weight must be given to the number of years during which he could abound in such stories, and attest their constant appropriateness by not repeating them.

This brilliant mental quality had its drawback, on which I have already touched in a rather different connection: the obstacle which it created to even serious and private conversation on any subject on which he was not neutral. Feeling, imagination, and the vividness of personal points of view, constantly thwarted the attempt at a dispassionate exchange of ideas. But the balance often righted itself when the excitement of the discussion was at an end; and it would even become apparent that expressions or arguments which he had passed over unheeded, or as it seemed unheard, had stored themselves in his mind and borne fruit there.

I think it is Mr. Sharp who has remarked that Mr. Browning combined impulsiveness of manner with much real reserve. He was habitually reticent where his deeper feelings were concerned; and the impulsiveness and the reticence were both equally rooted in his poetic and human temperament. The one meant the vital force of his emotions, the other their sensibility. In a smaller or more prosaic nature they must have modified each other. But the partial secretiveness had also occasionally its conscious motives, some unselfish, and some self-regarding; and from this point of view it stood in marked apparent antagonism to the more expansive quality. He never, however, intentionally withheld from others such things as it concerned them to know. His intellectual and religious convictions were open to all who seriously sought them; and if, even on such points, he did not appear communicative, it was because he took more interest in any subject of conversation which did not directly centre in himself.

Setting aside the delicacies which tend to self-concealment, and for which he had been always more or less conspicuous; excepting also the pride which would co-operate with them, all his inclinations were in the direction of truth; there was no quality which he so much loved and admired. He thought aloud wherever he could trust himself to do so. Impulse predominated in all the active manifestations of his nature. The fiery child and the impatient boy had left their traces in the man; and with them the peculiar childlike quality which the man of genius never outgrows, and which, in its mingled waywardness and sweetness, was present in Robert Browning till almost his dying day. There was also a recurrent touch of hardness, distinct from the comparatively ungenial mood of his earlier years of widowhood; and this, like his reserve, seemed to conflict with his general character, but in reality harmonized with it. It meant, not that feeling was suspended in him, but that it was compressed. It was his natural response to any opposition which his reasonings could not shake nor his will overcome, and which, rightly or not, conveyed to him the sense of being misunderstood. It reacted in pain for others, but it lay with an aching weight on his own heart, and was thrown off in an upheaval of the pent-up kindliness and affection, the moment their true springs were touched. The hardening power in his composition, though fugitive and comparatively seldom displayed, was in fact proportioned to his tenderness; and no one who had not seen him in the revulsion from a hard mood, or the regret for it, knew what that tenderness could be.

Underlying all the peculiarities of his nature, its strength and its weakness, its exuberance and its reserves, was the nervous excitability of which I have spoken in an earlier chapter. I have heard him say: 'I am nervous to such a degree that I might fancy I could not enter a drawing-room, if I did not know from long experience that I can do it.' He did not desire to conceal this fact, nor need others conceal it for him; since it was only calculated to disarm criticism and to strengthen sympathy. The special vital power which he derived from this organization need not be reaffirmed. It carried also its inevitable disablements. Its resources were not always under his own control; and he frequently complained of the lack of presence of mind which would seize him on any conventional emergency not included in the daily social routine. In a real one he was never at fault. He never failed in a sympathetic response or a playful retort; he was always provided with the exact counter requisite in a game of words. In this respect indeed he had all the powers of the conversationalist; and the perfect ease and grace and geniality of his manner on such occasions, arose probably far more from his innate human and social qualities than from even his familiar intercourse with the world. But he could not extemporize a speech. He could not on the spur of the moment string together the more or less set phrases which an after-dinner oration demands. All his friends knew this, and spared him the necessity of refusing. He had once a headache all day, because at a dinner, the night before, a false report had reached him that he was going to be asked to speak. This alone would have sufficed to prevent him from accepting any public post. He confesses the disability in a pretty note to Professor Knight, written in reference to a recent meeting of the Wordsworth Society.

19, Warwick Crescent, W.: May 9, '84.

My dear Professor Knight,—I seem ungracious and ungrateful, but am neither; though, now that your festival is over, I wish I could have overcome my scruples and apprehensions. It is hard to say—when kind people press one to 'just speak for a minute'—that the business, so easy to almost anybody, is too bewildering for oneself. Ever truly yours, Robert Browning.

A Rectorial Address need probably not have been extemporized, but it would also have been irksome to him to prepare. He was not accustomed to uttering himself in prose except within the limits, and under the incitements, of private correspondence. The ceremonial publicity attaching to all official proceedings would also have inevitably been a trial to him. He did at one of the Wordsworth Society meetings speak a sentence from the chair, in the absence of the appointed chairman, who had not yet arrived; and when he had received his degree from the University of Edinburgh he was persuaded to say a few words to the assembled students, in which I believe he thanked them for their warm welcome; but such exceptions only proved the rule.

We cannot doubt that the excited stream of talk which sometimes flowed from him was, in the given conditions of mind and imagination, due to a nervous impulse which he could not always restrain; and that the effusiveness of manner with which he greeted alike old friends and new, arose also from a momentary want of self-possession. We may admit this the more readily that in both cases it was allied to real kindness of intention, above all in the latter, where the fear of seeming cold towards even a friend's friend, strove increasingly with the defective memory for names and faces which were not quite familiar to him. He was also profoundly averse to the idea of posing as a man of superior gifts; having indeed, in regard to social intercourse, as little of the fastidiousness of genius as of its bohemianism. He, therefore, made it a rule, from the moment he took his place as a celebrity in the London world, to exert himself for the amusement of his fellow-guests at a dinner-table, whether their own mental resources were great or small; and this gave rise to a frequent effort at conversation, which converted itself into a habit, and ended by carrying him away. This at least was his own conviction in the matter. The loud voice, which so many persons must have learned to think habitual with him, bore also traces of this half-unconscious nervous stimulation.* It was natural to him in anger or excitement, but did not express his gentler or more equable states of feeling; and when he read to others on a subject which moved him, his utterance often subsided into a tremulous softness which left it scarcely audible.

* Miss Browning reminds me that loud speaking had become natural to him through the deafness of several of his intimate friends: Landor, Kirkup, Barry Cornwall, and previously his uncle Reuben, whose hearing had been impaired in early life by a blow from a cricket ball. This fact necessarily modifies my impression of the case, but does not quite destroy it.

The mental conditions under which his powers of sympathy were exercised imposed no limits on his spontaneous human kindness. This characteristic benevolence, or power of love, is not fully represented in Mr. Browning's works; it is certainly not prominent in those of the later period, during which it found the widest scope in his life; but he has in some sense given its measure in what was intended as an illustration of the opposite quality. He tells us, in 'Fifine at the Fair', that while the best strength of women is to be found in their love, the best product of a man is only yielded to hate. It is the 'indignant wine' which has been wrung from the grape plant by its external mutilation. He could depict it dramatically in more malignant forms of emotion; but he could only think of it personally as the reaction of a nobler feeling which has been gratuitously outraged or repressed.

He more directly, and still more truly, described himself when he said at about the same time, 'I have never at any period of my life been deaf to an appeal made to me in the name of love.' He was referring to an experience of many years before, in which he had even yielded his better judgment to such an appeal; and it was love in the larger sense for which the concession had been claimed.

It was impossible that so genuine a poet, and so real a man, should be otherwise than sensitive to the varied forms of feminine attraction. He avowedly preferred the society of women to that of men; they were, as I have already said, his habitual confidants, and, evidently, his most frequent correspondents; and though he could have dispensed with woman friends as he dispensed with many other things—though he most often won them without knowing it—his frank interest in their sex, and the often caressing kindness of manner in which it was revealed, might justly be interpreted by individual women into a conscious appeal to their sympathy. It was therefore doubly remarkable that on the ground of benevolence, he scarcely discriminated between the claim on him of a woman, and that of a man; and his attitude towards women was in this respect so distinctive as to merit some words of notice. It was large, generous, and unconventional; but, for that very reason, it was not, in the received sense of the word, chivalrous. Chivalry proceeds on the assumption that women not only cannot, but should not, take care of themselves in any active struggle with life; Mr. Browning had no theoretical objection to a woman's taking care of herself. He saw no reason why, if she was hit, she should not hit back again, or even why, if she hit, she should not receive an answering blow. He responded swiftly to every feminine appeal to his kindness or his protection, whether arising from physical weakness or any other obvious cause of helplessness or suffering; but the appeal in such cases lay first to his humanity, and only in second order to his consideration of sex. He would have had a man flogged who beat his wife; he would have had one flogged who ill-used a child—or an animal: he was notedly opposed to any sweeping principle or practice of vivisection. But he never quite understood that the strongest women are weak, or at all events vulnerable, in the very fact of their sex, through the minor traditions and conventions with which society justly, indeed necessarily, surrounds them. Still less did he understand those real, if impalpable, differences between men and women which correspond to the difference of position. He admitted the broad distinctions which have become proverbial, and are therefore only a rough measure of the truth. He could say on occasion: 'You ought to be better; you are a woman; I ought to know better; I am a man.' But he had had too large an experience of human nature to attach permanent weight to such generalizations; and they found certainly no expression in his works. Scarcely an instance of a conventional, or so-called man's woman, occurs in their whole range. Excepting perhaps the speaker in 'A Woman's Last Word', 'Pompilia' and 'Mildred' are the nearest approach to it; and in both of these we find qualities of imagination or thought which place them outside the conventional type. He instinctively judged women, both morally and intellectually, by the same standards as men; and when confronted by some divergence of thought or feeling, which meant, in the woman's case, neither quality nor defect in any strict sense of the word, but simply a nature trained to different points of view, an element of perplexity entered into his probable opposition. When the difference presented itself in a neutral aspect, it affected him like the casual peculiarities of a family or a group, or a casual disagreement between things of the same kind. He would say to a woman friend: 'You women are so different from men!' in the tone in which he might have said, 'You Irish, or you Scotch, are so different from Englishmen;' or again, 'It is impossible for a man to judge how a woman would act in such or such a case; you are so different;' the case being sometimes one in which it would be inconceivable to a normal woman, and therefore to the generality of men, that she should act in any but one way.

The vague sense of mystery with which the poet's mind usually invests a being of the opposite sex, had thus often in him its counterpart in a puzzled dramatic curiosity which constituted an equal ground of interest.

This virtual admission of equality between the sexes, combined with his Liberal principles to dispose him favourably towards the movement for Female Emancipation. He approved of everything that had been done for the higher instruction of women, and would, not very long ago, have supported their admission to the Franchise. But he was so much displeased by the more recent action of some of the lady advocates of Women's Rights, that, during the last year of his life, after various modifications of opinion, he frankly pledged himself to the opposite view. He had even visions of writing a tragedy or drama in support of it. The plot was roughly sketched, and some dialogue composed, though I believe no trace of this remains.

It is almost implied by all I have said, that he possessed in every mood the charm of perfect simplicity of manner. On this point he resembled his father. His tastes lay also in the direction of great simplicity of life, though circumstances did not allow of his indulging them to the same extent. It may interest those who never saw him to know that he always dressed as well as the occasion required, and always with great indifference to the subject. In Florence he wore loose clothes which were adapted to the climate; in London his coats were cut by a good tailor in whatever was the prevailing fashion; the change was simply with him an incident of the situation. He had also a look of dainty cleanliness which was heightened by the smooth healthy texture of the skin, and in later life by the silvery whiteness of his hair.

His best photographic likenesses were those taken by Mr. Fradelle in 1881, Mr. Cameron and Mr. William Grove in 1888 and 1889.



Chapter 21

1887-1889

Marriage of Mr. Barrett Browning—Removal to De Vere Gardens—Symptoms of failing Strength—New Poems; New Edition of his Works—Letters to Mr. George Bainton, Mr. Smith, and Lady Martin—Primiero and Venice—Letters to Miss Keep—The last Year in London—Asolo—Letters to Mrs. Fitz-Gerald, Mrs. Skirrow, and Mr. G. M. Smith.



The last years of Mr. Browning's life were introduced by two auspicious events, in themselves of very unequal importance, but each in its own way significant for his happiness and his health. One was his son's marriage on October 4, 1887, to Miss Fannie Coddington, of New York, a lady towards whom Mr. Barrett Browning had been strongly attracted when he was a very young man and she little more than a child; the other, his own removal from Warwick Crescent to De Vere Gardens, which took place in the previous June. The change of residence had long been with him only a question of opportunity. He was once even in treaty for a piece of ground at Kensington, and intended building a house. That in which he had lived for so many years had faults of construction and situation which the lapse of time rendered only more conspicuous; the Regent's Canal Bill had also doomed it to demolition; and when an opening presented itself for securing one in all essentials more suitable, he was glad to seize it, though at the eleventh hour. He had mentally fixed on the new locality in those earlier days in which he still thought his son might eventually settle in London; and it possessed at the same time many advantages for himself. It was warmer and more sheltered than any which he could have found on the north side of the Park; and, in that close vicinity to Kensington Gardens, walking might be contemplated as a pleasure, instead of mere compulsory motion from place to place. It was only too soon apparent that the time had passed when he could reap much benefit from the event; but he became aware from the first moment of his installation in the new home that the conditions of physical life had become more favourable for him. He found an almost pathetic pleasure in completing the internal arrangements of the well-built, commodious house. It seems, on looking back, as if the veil had dropped before his eyes which sometimes shrouds the keenest vision in face of an impending change; and he had imagined, in spite of casual utterances which disclaimed the hope, that a new lease of life was being given to him. He had for several years been preparing for the more roomy dwelling which he would probably some day inhabit; and handsome pieces of old furniture had been stowed away in the house in Warwick Crescent, pending the occasion for their use. He loved antiquities of this kind, in a manner which sometimes recalled his father's affection for old books; and most of these had been bought in Venice, where frequent visits to the noted curiosity-shops had been his one bond of habit with his tourist countrymen in that city. They matched the carved oak and massive gildings and valuable tapestries which had carried something of Casa Guidi into his first London home. Brass lamps that had once hung inside chapels in some Catholic church, had long occupied the place of the habitual gaselier; and to these was added in the following year one of silver, also brought from Venice—the Jewish 'Sabbath lamp'. Another acquisition, made only a few months, if indeed so long, before he left London for the last time, was that of a set of casts representing the Seasons, which were to stand at intervals on brackets in a certain unsightly space on his drawing-room wall; and he had said of these, which I think his son was procuring for him: 'Only my four little heads, and then I shall not buy another thing for the house'—in a tone of childlike satisfaction at his completed work.

This summer he merely went to St. Moritz, where he and his sister were, for the greater part of their stay, again guests of Mrs. Bloomfield Moore. He was determined to give the London winter a fuller trial in the more promising circumstances of his new life, and there was much to be done in De Vere Gardens after his return. His father's six thousand books, together with those he had himself accumulated, were for the first time to be spread out in their proper array, instead of crowding together in rows, behind and behind each other. The new bookcases, which could stand in the large new study, were waiting to receive them. He did not know until he tried to fulfil it how greatly the task would tax his strength. The library was, I believe, never completely arranged.

During this winter of 1887-8 his friends first perceived that a change had come over him. They did not realize that his life was drawing to a close; it was difficult to do so when so much of the former elasticity remained; when he still proclaimed himself 'quite well' so long as he was not definitely suffering. But he was often suffering; one terrible cold followed another. There was general evidence that he had at last grown old. He, however, made no distinct change in his mode of life. Old habits, suspended by his longer imprisonments to the house, were resumed as soon as he was set free. He still dined out; still attended the private view of every, or almost every art exhibition. He kept up his unceasing correspondence—in one or two cases voluntarily added to it; though he would complain day after day that his fingers ached from the number of hours through which he had held his pen. One of the interesting letters of this period was written to Mr. George Bainton, of Coventry, to be used, as that gentleman tells me, in the preparation of a lecture on the 'Art of Effective Written Composition'. It confirms the statement I have had occasion to make, that no extraneous influence ever permanently impressed itself on Mr. Browning's style.

29, De Vere Gardens: Oct. 6, '87.

Dear Sir,—I was absent from London when your kind letter reached this house, to which I removed some time ago—hence the delay in acknowledging your kindness and replying, in some degree, to your request. All I can say, however, is this much—and very little—that, by the indulgence of my father and mother, I was allowed to live my own life and choose my own course in it; which, having been the same from the beginning to the end, necessitated a permission to read nearly all sorts of books, in a well-stocked and very miscellaneous library. I had no other direction than my parents' taste for whatever was highest and best in literature; but I found out for myself many forgotten fields which proved the richest of pastures: and, so far as a preference of a particular 'style' is concerned, I believe mine was just the same at first as at last. I cannot name any one author who exclusively influenced me in that respect,—as to the fittest expression of thought—but thought itself had many impulsions from very various sources, a matter not to your present purpose. I repeat, this is very little to say, but all in my power—and it is heartily at your service—if not as of any value, at least as a proof that I gratefully feel your kindness, and am, dear Sir Yours very truly, Robert Browning.

In December 1887 he wrote 'Rosny', the first poem in 'Asolando', and that which perhaps most displays his old subtle dramatic power; it was followed by 'Beatrice Signorini' and 'Flute-Music'. Of the 'Bad Dreams' two or three were also written in London, I think, during that winter. The 'Ponte dell' Angelo' was imagined during the next autumn in Venice. 'White Witchcraft' had been suggested in the same summer by a letter from a friend in the Channel Islands which spoke of the number of toads to be seen there. In the spring of 1888 he began revising his works for the last, and now entirely uniform edition, which was issued in monthly volumes, and completed by the July of 1889. Important verbal corrections were made in 'The Inn Album', though not, I think, in many of the later poems; but that in which he found most room for improvement was, very naturally, 'Pauline'; and he wrote concerning it to Mr. Smith the following interesting letter.

29, De Vere Gardens, W.: Feb. 27, '88.

My dear Smith,—When I received the Proofs of the 1st. vol. on Friday evening, I made sure of returning them next day—so accurately are they printed. But on looking at that unlucky 'Pauline', which I have not touched for half a century, a sudden impulse came over me to take the opportunity of just correcting the most obvious faults of expression, versification and construction,—letting the thoughts—such as they are—remain exactly as at first: I have only treated the imperfect expression of these just as I have now and then done for an amateur friend, if he asked me and I liked him enough to do so. Not a line is displaced, none added, none taken away. I have just sent it to the printer's with an explanatory word: and told him that he will have less trouble with all the rest of the volumes put together than with this little portion. I expect to return all the rest to-morrow or next day.

As for the sketch—the portrait—it admits of no very superior treatment: but, as it is the only one which makes me out youngish,—I should like to know if an artist could not strengthen the thing by a pencil touch or two in a few minutes—improve the eyes, eyebrows, and mouth somewhat. The head too wants improvement: were Pen here he could manage it all in a moment. Ever truly yours, Robert Browning.

Any attempt at modifying the expressed thoughts of his twenty-first year would have been, as he probably felt, a futile tampering with the work of another man; his literary conscience would have forbidden this, if it had been otherwise possible. But he here proves by his own words what I have already asserted, that the power of detail correction either was, or had become by experience, very strong in him.

The history of this summer of 1888 is partly given in a letter to Lady Martin.

29, De Vere Gardens, W.: Aug. 12, '88.

Dear Lady Martin,—The date of your kind letter,—June 18,—would affect me indeed, but for the good conscience I retain despite of appearances. So uncertain have I been as to the course we should take,—my sister and myself—when the time came for leaving town, that it seemed as if 'next week' might be the eventful week when all doubts would disappear—perhaps the strange cold weather and interminable rain made it hard to venture from under one's roof even in fancy of being better lodged elsewhere. This very day week it was the old story—cold—then followed the suffocating eight or nine tropical days which forbade any more delay, and we leave to-morrow for a place called Primiero, near Feltre—where my son and his wife assure us we may be comfortably—and coolly—housed, until we can accompany them to Venice, which we may stay at for a short time. You remember our troubles at Llangollen about the purchase of a Venetian house . . . ? My son, however, nothing daunted, and acting under abler counsels than I was fortunate enough to obtain,* has obtained a still more desirable acquisition, in the shape of the well-known Rezzonico Palace (that of Pope Clement 13th)—and, I believe, is to be congratulated on his bargain. I cannot profess the same interest in this as in the earlier object of his ambition, but am quite satisfied by the evident satisfaction of the 'young people'. So,—by the old law of compensation,—while we may expect pleasant days abroad—our chance is gone of once again enjoying your company in your own lovely Vale of Llangollen;—had we not been pulled otherwise by the inducements we could not resist,—another term of delightful weeks—each tipped with a sweet starry Sunday at the little church leading to the House Beautiful where we took our rest of an evening spent always memorably—this might have been our fortunate lot once again! As it is, perhaps we need more energetic treatment than we should get with you —for both of us are more oppressed than ever by the exigencies of the lengthy season, and require still more bracing air than the gently lulling temperature of Wales. May it be doing you, and dear Sir Theodore, all the good you deserve—throwing in the share due to us, who must forego it! With all love from us both, ever affectionately yours Robert Browning.

* Those of Mr. Alexander Malcolm.

He did start for Italy on the following day, but had become so ill, that he was on the point of postponing his departure. He suffered throughout the journey as he had never suffered on any journey before; and during his first few days at Primiero, could only lead the life of an invalid. He rallied, however, as usual, under the potent effects of quiet, fresh air, and sunshine; and fully recovered his normal state before proceeding to Venice, where the continued sense of physical health combined with many extraneous circumstances to convert his proposed short stay into a long one. A letter from the mountains, addressed to a lady who had never been abroad, and to whom he sometimes wrote with more descriptive detail than to other friends, gives a touching glimpse of his fresh delight in the beauties of nature, and his tender constant sympathy with the animal creation.

Primiero: Sept. 7, '88.

. . . . .

'The weather continues exquisitely temperate, yet sunny, ever since the clearing thunderstorm of which I must have told you in my last. It is, I am more and more confirmed in believing, the most beautiful place I was ever resident in: far more so than Gressoney or even St.-Pierre de Chartreuse. You would indeed delight in seeing the magnificence of the mountains,—the range on either side, which morning and evening, in turn, transmute literally to gold,—I mean what I say. Their utterly bare ridges of peaks and crags of all shape, quite naked of verdure, glow like yellow ore; and, at times, there is a silver change, as the sun prevails or not.

'The valley is one green luxuriance on all sides; Indian corn, with beans, gourds, and even cabbages, filling up the interstices; and the flowers, though not presenting any novelty to my uninstructed eyes, yet surely more large and purely developed than I remember to have seen elsewhere. For instance, the tiger-lilies in the garden here must be above ten feet high, every bloom faultless, and, what strikes me as peculiar, every leaf on the stalk from bottom to top as perfect as if no insect existed to spoil them by a notch or speck. . . .

'. . . Did I tell you we had a little captive fox,—the most engaging of little vixens? To my great joy she has broken her chain and escaped, never to be recaptured, I trust. The original wild and untameable nature was to be plainly discerned even in this early stage of the whelp's life: she dug herself, with such baby feet, a huge hole, the use of which was evident, when, one day, she pounced thence on a stray turkey—allured within reach by the fragments of fox's breakfast,—the intruder escaping with the loss of his tail. The creature came back one night to explore the old place of captivity,—ate some food and retired. For myself,—I continue absolutely well: I do not walk much, but for more than amends, am in the open air all day long.'

No less striking is a short extract from a letter written in Venice to the same friend, Miss Keep.

Ca' Alvise: Oct. 16, '88.

'Every morning at six, I see the sun rise; far more wonderfully, to my mind, than his famous setting, which everybody glorifies. My bedroom window commands a perfect view: the still, grey lagune, the few seagulls flying, the islet of S. Giorgio in deep shadow, and the clouds in a long purple rack, behind which a sort of spirit of rose burns up till presently all the rims are on fire with gold, and last of all the orb sends before it a long column of its own essence apparently: so my day begins.'

We feel, as we read these late, and even later words, that the lyric imagination was renewing itself in the incipient dissolution of other powers. It is the Browning of 'Pippa Passes' who speaks in them.

He suffered less on the whole during the winter of 1888-9. It was already advanced when he returned to England; and the attacks of cold and asthma were either shorter or less frequent. He still maintained throughout the season his old social routine, not omitting his yearly visit, on the anniversary of Waterloo, to Lord Albemarle, its last surviving veteran. He went for some days to Oxford during the commemoration week, and had for the first, as also last time, the pleasure of Dr. Jowett's almost exclusive society at his beloved Balliol College. He proceeded with his new volume of poems. A short letter written to Professor Knight, June 16, and of which the occasion speaks for itself, fitly closes the labours of his life; for it states his view of the position and function of poetry, in one brief phrase, which might form the text to an exhaustive treatise upon them.

29, De Vere Gardens, W.: June 16, 1889.

My dear Professor Knight,—I am delighted to hear that there is a likelihood of your establishing yourself in Glasgow, and illustrating Literature as happily as you have expounded Philosophy at St. Andrews. It is certainly the right order of things: Philosophy first, and Poetry, which is its highest outcome, afterward—and much harm has been done by reversing the natural process. How capable you are of doing justice to the highest philosophy embodied in poetry, your various studies of Wordsworth prove abundantly; and for the sake of both Literature and Philosophy I wish you success with all my heart.

Believe me, dear Professor Knight, yours very truly, Robert Browning.

But he experienced, when the time came, more than his habitual disinclination for leaving home. A distinct shrinking from the fatigue of going to Italy now added itself to it; for he had suffered when travelling back in the previous winter, almost as much as on the outward journey, though he attributed the distress to a different cause: his nerves were, he thought, shaken by the wearing discomforts incidental on a broken tooth. He was for the first time painfully sensitive to the vibration of the train. He had told his friends, both in Venice and London, that so far as he was able to determine, he would never return to Italy. But it was necessary he should go somewhere, and he had no alternative plan. For a short time in this last summer he entertained the idea of a visit to Scotland; it had indeed definitely shaped itself 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 for this pretty but petty dominion where she kept state in a mimic Court, with Bembo, afterwards Cardinal, for her secretary—who has commemorated the fact in his 'Asolani' or dialogues inspired by the place: and I do assure you that, after some experience of beautiful sights in Italy and elsewhere I know nothing comparable to the view from the Queen's tower and palace, still perfect in every respect. Whenever you pay Pen and his wife the visit you are pledged to, * it will go hard but you spend five hours in a journey to Asolo. The one thing I am disappointed in is to find that the silk-cultivation with all the pretty girls who were engaged in it are transported to Cornuda and other places,—nearer the railway, I suppose: and to this may be attributed the decrease in the number of inhabitants. The weather when I wrote last was 'blue and blazing—(at noon-day)—' but we share in the general plague of rain,—had a famous storm yesterday: while to-day is blue and sunny as ever. Lastly, for your admonition: we have a perfect telegraphic communication; and at the passage above, where I put a * I was interrupted by the arrival of a telegram: thank you all the same for your desire to relieve my anxiety. And now, to our immediate business— which is only to keep thanking you for your constant goodness, present and future: do with the book just as you will. I fancy it is bigger in bulk than usual. As for the 'proofs'—I go at the end of the month to Venice, whither you will please to send whatever is necessary. . . . I shall do well to say as little as possible of my good wishes for you and your family, for it comes to much the same thing as wishing myself prosperity: no matter, my sister's kindest regards shall excuse mine, and I will only add that I am, as ever, Affectionately yours Robert Browning.

A general quickening of affectionate impulse seemed part of this last leap in the socket of the dying flame.



Chapter 22

1889

Proposed Purchase of Land at Asolo—Venice—Letter to Mr. G. Moulton-Barrett—Lines in the 'Athenaeum'—Letter to Miss Keep—Illness—Death— Funeral Ceremonial at Venice—Publication of 'Asolando'—Interment in Poets' Corner.



He had said in writing to Mrs. FitzGerald, 'Shall I ever see them' (the things he is describing) 'again?' If not then, soon afterwards, he conceived a plan which was to insure his doing so. On a piece of ground belonging to the old castle, stood the shell of a house. The two constituted one property which the Municipality of Asolo had hitherto refused to sell. It had been a dream of Mr. Browning's life to possess a dwelling, however small, in some beautiful spot, which should place him beyond the necessity of constantly seeking a new summer resort, and above the alternative of living at an inn, or accepting—as he sometimes feared, abusing—the hospitality of his friends. He was suddenly fascinated by the idea of buying this piece of ground; and, with the efficient help which his son could render during his absence, completing the house, which should be christened 'Pippa's Tower'. It was evident, he said in one of his letters, that for his few remaining years his summer wanderings must always end in Venice. What could he do better than secure for himself this resting-place by the way?

His offer of purchase was made through Mrs. Bronson, to Count Loredano and other important members of the municipality, and their personal assent to it secured. But the town council was on the eve of re-election; no important business could be transacted by it till after this event; and Mr. Browning awaited its decision till the end of October at Asolo, and again throughout November in Venice, without fully understanding the delay. The vote proved favourable; but the night on which it was taken was that of his death.

The consent thus given would have been only a first step towards the accomplishment of his wish. It was necessary that it should be ratified by the Prefecture of Treviso, in the district of which Asolo lies; and Mr. Barrett Browning, who had determined to carry on the negotiations, met with subsequent opposition in the higher council. This has now, however, been happily overcome.

A comprehensive interest attaches to one more letter of the Asolo time. It was addressed to Mr. Browning's brother-in-law, Mr. George Moulton-Barrett.

Asolo, Veneto: Oct. 22, '89.

My dear George,—It was a great pleasure to get your kind letter; though after some delay. We were not in the Tyrol this year, but have been for six weeks or more in this little place which strikes me,—as it did fifty years ago, which is something to say, considering that, properly speaking, it was the first spot of Italian soil I ever set foot upon— having proceeded to Venice by sea—and thence here. It is an ancient city, older than Rome, and the scene of Queen Catharine Cornaro's exile, where she held a mock court, with all its attendants, on a miniature scale; Bembo, afterwards Cardinal, being her secretary. Her palace is still above us all, the old fortifications surround the hill-top, and certain of the houses are stately—though the population is not above 1,000 souls: the province contains many more of course. But the immense charm of the surrounding country is indescribable—I have never seen its like—the Alps on one side, the Asolan mountains all round,—and opposite, the vast Lombard plain,—with indications of Venice, Padua, and the other cities, visible to a good eye on a clear day; while everywhere are sites of battles and sieges of bygone days, described in full by the historians of the Middle Ages.

We have a valued friend here, Mrs. Bronson, who for years has been our hostess at Venice, and now is in possession of a house here (built into the old city wall)—she was induced to choose it through what I have said about the beauties of the place: and through her care and kindness we are comfortably lodged close by. We think of leaving in a week or so for Venice—guests of Pen and his wife; and after a short stay with them we shall return to London. Pen came to see us for a couple of days: I was hardly prepared for his surprise and admiration which quite equalled my own and that of my sister. All is happily well with them—their palazzo excites the wonder of everybody, so great is Pen's cleverness, and extemporised architectural knowledge, as apparent in all he has done there; why, why will you not go and see him there? He and his wife are very hospitable and receive many visitors. Have I told you that there was a desecrated chapel which he has restored in honour of his mother— putting up there the inscription by Tommaseo now above Casa Guidi?

Fannie is all you say,—and most dear and precious to us all. . . . Pen's medal to which you refer, is awarded to him in spite of his written renunciation of any sort of wish to contend for a prize. He will now resume painting and sculpture—having been necessarily occupied with the superintendence of his workmen—a matter capitally managed, I am told. For the rest, both Sarianna and myself are very well; I have just sent off my new volume of verses for publication. The complete edition of the works of E. B. B. begins in a few days.

The second part of this letter is very forcibly written, and, in a certain sense, more important than the first; but I suppress it by the desire of Mr. Browning's sister and son, and in complete concurrence with their judgment in the matter. It was a systematic defence of the anger aroused in him by a lately published reference to his wife's death; and though its reasonings were unanswerable as applied to the causes of his emotion, they did not touch the manner in which it had been displayed. The incident was one which deserved only to be forgotten; and if an injudicious act had not preserved its memory, no word of mine should recall it. Since, however, it has been thought fit to include the 'Lines to Edward Fitzgerald' in a widely circulated Bibliography of Mr. Browning's Works,* I owe it to him to say—what I believe is only known to his sister and myself—that there was a moment in which he regretted those lines, and would willingly have withdrawn them. This was the period, unfortunately short, which intervened between his sending them to the 'Athenaeum', and their appearance there. When once public opinion had expressed itself upon them in its too extreme forms of sympathy and condemnation, the pugnacity of his mind found support in both, and regret was silenced if not destroyed. In so far as his published words remained open to censure, I may also, without indelicacy, urge one more plea in his behalf. That which to the merely sympathetic observer appeared a subject for disapprobation, perhaps disgust, had affected him with the directness of a sharp physical blow. He spoke of it, and for hours, even days, was known to feel it, as such. The events of that distant past, which he had lived down, though never forgotten, had flashed upon him from the words which so unexpectedly met his eye, in a vividness of remembrance which was reality. 'I felt as if she had died yesterday,' he said some days later to a friend, in half deprecation, half denial, of the too great fierceness of his reaction. He only recovered his balance in striking the counter-blow. That he could be thus affected at an age usually destructive of the more violent emotions, is part of the mystery of those closing days which had already overtaken him.

* That contained in Mr. Sharp's 'Life'. A still more recent publication gives the lines in full.

By the first of November he was in Venice with his son and daughter; and during the three following weeks was apparently well, though a physician whom he met at a dinner party, and to whom he had half jokingly given his pulse to feel, had learned from it that his days were numbered. He wrote to Miss Keep on the 9th of the month:

'. . . Mrs. Bronson has bought a house at Asolo, and beautified it indeed,—niched as it is in an old tower of the fortifications still partly surrounding the city (for a city it is), and eighteen towers, more or less ruinous, are still discoverable there: it is indeed a delightful place. Meantime, to go on,—we came here, and had a pleasant welcome from our hosts—who are truly magnificently lodged in this vast palazzo which my son has really shown himself fit to possess, so surprising are his restorations and improvements: the whole is all but complete, decorated,—that is, renewed admirably in all respects.

'What strikes me as most noteworthy is the cheerfulness and comfort of the huge rooms.

'The building is warmed throughout by a furnace and pipes.

'Yesterday, on the Lido, the heat was hardly endurable: bright sunshine, blue sky,—snow-tipped Alps in the distance. No place, I think, ever suited my needs, bodily and intellectual, so well.

'The first are satisfied—I am quite well, every breathing inconvenience gone: and as for the latter, I got through whatever had given me trouble in London. . . .'

But it was winter, even in Venice, and one day began with an actual fog. He insisted, notwithstanding, on taking his usual walk on the Lido. He caught a bronchial cold of which the symptoms were aggravated not only by the asthmatic tendency, but by what proved to be exhaustion of the heart; and believing as usual that his liver alone was at fault, he took little food, and refused wine altogether.*

* He always declined food when he was unwell; and maintained that in this respect the instinct of animals was far more just than the idea often prevailing among human beings that a failing appetite should be assisted or coerced.

He did not yield to the sense of illness; he did not keep his bed. Some feverish energy must have supported him through this avoidance of every measure which might have afforded even temporary strength or relief. On Friday, the 29th, he wrote to a friend in London that he had waited thus long for the final answer from Asolo, but would wait no longer. He would start for England, if possible, on the Wednesday or Thursday of the following week. It was true 'he had caught a cold; he felt sadly asthmatic, scarcely fit to travel; but he hoped for the best, and would write again soon.' He wrote again the following day, declaring himself better. He had been punished, he said, for long-standing neglect of his 'provoking liver'; but a simple medicine, which he had often taken before, had this time also relieved the oppression of his chest; his friend was not to be uneasy about him; 'it was in his nature to get into scrapes of this kind, but he always managed, somehow or other, to extricate himself from them.' He concluded with fresh details of his hopes and plans.

In the ensuing night the bronchial distress increased; and in the morning he consented to see his son's physician, Dr. Cini, whose investigation of the case at once revealed to him its seriousness. The patient had been removed two days before, from the second storey of the house, which the family then inhabited, to an entresol apartment just above the ground-floor, from which he could pass into the dining-room without fatigue. Its lower ceilings gave him (erroneously) an impression of greater warmth, and he had imagined himself benefited by the change. A freer circulation of air was now considered imperative, and he was carried to Mrs. Browning's spacious bedroom, where an open fireplace supplied both warmth and ventilation, and large windows admitted all the sunshine of the Grand Canal. Everything was done for him which professional skill and loving care could do. Mrs. Browning, assisted by her husband, and by a young lady who was then her guest,* filled the place of the trained nurses until these could arrive; for a few days the impending calamity seemed even to have been averted. The bronchial attack was overcome. Mr. Browning had once walked from the bed to the sofa; his sister, whose anxiety had perhaps been spared the full knowledge of his state, could send comforting reports to his friends at home. But the enfeebled heart had made its last effort. Attacks of faintness set in. Special signs of physical strength maintained themselves until within a few hours of the end. On Wednesday, December 11, a consultation took place between Dr. Cini, Dr. da Vigna, and Dr. Minich; and the opinion was then expressed for the first time that recovery, though still possible, was not within the bounds of probability. Weakness, however, rapidly gained upon him towards the close of the following day. Two hours before midnight of this Thursday, December 12, he breathed his last.

* Miss Evelyn Barclay, now Mrs. Douglas Giles.

He had been a good patient. He took food and medicine whenever they were offered to him. Doctors and nurses became alike warmly interested in him. His favourite among the latter was, I think, the Venetian, a widow, Margherita Fiori, a simple kindly creature who had known much sorrow. To her he said, about five hours before the end, 'I feel much worse. I know now that I must die.' He had shown at intervals a perception, even conviction, of his danger; but the excitement of the brain, caused by exhaustion on the one hand and the necessary stimulants on the other, must have precluded all systematic consciousness of approaching death. He repeatedly assured his family that he was not suffering.

A painful and urgent question now presented itself for solution: Where should his body find its last rest? He had said to his sister in the foregoing summer, that he wished to be buried wherever he might die: if in England, with his mother; if in France, with his father; if in Italy, with his wife. Circumstances all pointed to his removal to Florence; but a recent decree had prohibited further interment in the English Cemetery there, and the town had no power to rescind it. When this was known in Venice, that city begged for itself the privilege of retaining the illustrious guest, and rendering him the last honours. For the moment the idea even recommended itself to Mr. Browning's son. But he felt bound to make a last effort in the direction of the burial at Florence; and was about to despatch a telegram, in which he invoked the mediation of Lord Dufferin, when all difficulties were laid at rest by a message from the Dean of Westminster, conveying his assent to an interment in the Abbey.* He had already telegraphed for information concerning the date of the funeral, with a view to the memorial service, which he intended to hold on the same day. Nor would the further honour have remained for even twenty-four hours ungranted, because unasked, but for the belief prevailing among Mr. Browning's friends that there was no room for its acceptance.