Life of Robert Browning(罗伯特·布朗宁传)

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Life of Robert Browning

by William Sharp

Life of Robert Browning

Note.

In all important respects I leave this volume to speak for itself. For

obvious reasons it does not pretend to be more than a `Memoire pour

servir': in the nature of things, the definitive biography cannot appear for

many years to come. None the less gratefully may I take the present

opportunity to express my indebtedness to Mr. R. Barrett Browning, and to

other relatives and intimate friends of Robert Browning, who have given

me serviceable information, and otherwise rendered kindly aid. For some

of the hitherto unpublished details my thanks are, in particular, due to Mrs.

Fraser Corkran and Miss Alice Corkran, and to other old friends of the

poet and his family, here, in Italy, and in America; though in one or two

instances, I may add, I had them from Robert Browning himself. It is with

pleasure that I further acknowledge my indebtedness to Dr. Furnivall, for

the loan of the advance-proofs of his privately-printed pamphlet on

"Browning's Ancestors"; and to the Browning Society's Publications --

particularly to Mrs. Sutherland Orr's and Dr. Furnivall's biographical and

bibliographical contributions thereto; to Mr. Gosse's biographical article in

the `Century Magazine' for 1881; to Mr. Ingram's `Life of E. B. Browning';

and to the `Memoirs of Anna Jameson', the `Italian Note-Books' of

Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mr. G. S. Hillard's `Six Months in Italy' (1853), and

the Lives and Correspondence of Macready, Miss Mitford, Leigh Hunt,

and Walter Savage Landor. I regret that the imperative need of concision

has prevented the insertion of many of the letters, anecdotes, and

reminiscences, so generously placed at my disposal; but possibly I may

have succeeded in educing from them some essential part of that light

which they undoubtedly cast upon the personality and genius of the poet.

Life of Robert Browning

CHAPTER 1.

It must, to admirers of Browning's writings, appear singularly

appropriate that so cosmopolitan a poet was born in London. It would

seem as though something of that mighty complex life, so confusedly

petty to the narrow vision, so grandiose and even majestic to the larger ken,

had blent with his being from the first. What fitter birthplace for the poet

whom a comrade has called the "Subtlest Assertor of the Soul in Song",

the poet whose writings are indeed a mirror of the age?

A man may be in all things a Londoner and yet be a provincial. The

accident of birthplace does not necessarily involve parochialism of the

soul. It is not the village which produces the Hampden, but the Hampden

who immortalises the village. It is a favourite jest of Rusticus that his

urban brother has the manner of Omniscience and the knowledge of a

parish beadle. Nevertheless, though the strongest blood insurgent in the

metropolitan heart is not that which is native to it, one might well be proud

to have had one's atom-pulse atune from the first with the large rhythm of

the national life at its turbulent, congested, but ever ebullient centre.

Certainly Browning was not the man to be ashamed of his being a

Londoner, much less to deny his natal place. He was proud of it: through

good sense, no doubt, but possibly also through some instinctive

apprehension of the fact that the great city was indeed the fit mother of

such a son. "Ashamed of having been born in the greatest city of the

world!" he exclaimed on one occasion; "what an extraordinary thing to say!

It suggests a wavelet in a muddy shallow grimily contorting itself because

it had its birth out in the great ocean."

On the day of the poet's funeral in Westminster Abbey, one of the most

eminent of his peers remarked to me that Browning came to us as one

coming into his own. This is profoundly true. There was in good sooth a

mansion prepared against his advent. Long ago, we should have

surrendered as to a conqueror: now, however, we know that princes of the

mind, though they must be valorous and potent as of yore, can enter upon

no heritance save that which naturally awaits them, and has been made

Life of Robert Browning

theirs by long and intricate processes.

The lustrum which saw the birth of Robert Browning, that is the third

in the nineteenth century, was a remarkable one indeed. Thackeray came

into the world some months earlier than the great poet, Charles Dickens

within the same twelvemonth, and Tennyson three years sooner, when also

Elizabeth Barrett was born, and the foremost naturalist of modern times

first saw the light. It is a matter of significance that the great wave of

scientific thought which ultimately bore forward on its crest so many

famous men, from Brewster and Faraday to Charles Darwin, had just

begun to rise with irresistible impulsion. Lepsius's birth was in 1813, and

that of the great Flemish novelist, Henri Conscience, in 1812: about the

same period were the births of Freiligrath, Gutzkow, and Auerbach,

respectively one of the most lyrical poets, the most potent dramatist, the

most charming romancer of Germany: and, also, in France, of Theophile

Gautier and Alfred de Musset. Among representatives of the other arts --

with two of which Browning must ever be closely associated --

Mendelssohn and Chopin were born in 1809, and Schumann, Liszt, and

Wagner within the four succeeding years: within which space also came

Diaz and Meissonier and the great Millet. Other high names there are upon

the front of the century. Macaulay, Cardinal Newman, John Stuart Mill

(one of the earliest, by the way, to recognise the genius of Browning),

Alexandre Dumas, George Sand, Victor Hugo, Ampere, Quinet, Prosper

Merimee, Sainte-Beuve, Strauss, Montalambert, are among the laurel-

bearers who came into existence betwixt 1800 and 1812.

When Robert Browning was born in London in 1812, Sheridan had

still four years to live; Jeremy Bentham was at the height of his

contemporary reputation, and Godwin was writing glibly of the virtues of

humanity and practising the opposite qualities, while Crabbe was looked

upon as one of the foremost of living poets. Wordsworth was then forty,

Sir Walter Scott forty-one, Coleridge forty-two, Walter Savage Landor and

Charles Lamb each in his forty-fifth year. Byron was four-and-twenty,

Shelley not yet quite of age, two radically different men, Keats and

Carlyle, both youths of seventeen. Abroad, Laplace was in his maturity,

with fifteen years more yet to live; Joubert with twelve; Goethe, with

Life of Robert Browning

twenty; Lamarck, the Schlegels, Cuvier, Chateaubriand, Hegel, Niebuehr

(to specify some leading names only), had many years of work before

them. Schopenhauer was only four-and-twenty, while Beranger was thirty-

two. The Polish poet Mickiewicz was a boy of fourteen, and Poushkin was

but a twelvemonth older; Heine, a lad of twelve, was already enamoured

of the great Napoleonic legend. The foremost literary critic of the century

was running about the sands of Boulogne, or perhaps wandering often

along the ramparts of the old town, introspective even then, with

something of that rare and insatiable curiosity which we all now recognise

as so distinctive of Sainte-Beuve. Again, the greatest creative literary artist

of the century, in prose at any rate, was leading an apparently somewhat

indolent schoolboy life at Tours, undreamful yet of enormous debts,

colossal undertakings, gigantic failures, and the `Comedie Humaine'. In art,

Sir Henry Raeburn, William Blake, Flaxman, Canova, Thorwaldsen,

Crome, Sir Thomas Lawrence, Constable, Sir David Wilkie, and Turner

were in the exercise of their happiest faculties: as were, in the usage of

theirs, Beethoven, Weber, Schubert, Spohr, Donizetti, and Bellini.

It is not inadvisedly that I make this specification of great names, of

men who were born coincidentally with, or were in the broader sense

contemporaries of Robert Browning. There is no such thing as a fortuitous

birth. Creation does not occur spontaneously, as in that drawing of David

Scott's where from the footprint of the Omnipotent spring human spirits

and fiery stars. Literally indeed, as a great French writer has indicated, a

man is the child of his time. It is a matter often commented upon by

students of literature, that great men do not appear at the beginning, but

rather at the acme of a period. They are not the flying scud of the coming

wave, but the gleaming crown of that wave itself. The epoch expends itself

in preparation for these great ones.

If Nature's first law were not a law of excess, the economy of life

would have meagre results. I think it is Turgeniev who speaks somewhere

of her as a gigantic Titan, working in gloomy silence, with the same

savage intentness upon a subtler twist of a flea's joints as upon the

Destinies of Man.

If there be a more foolish cry than that poetry is on the wane, it is that

Life of Robert Browning

the great days had passed away even before Robert Browning and Alfred

Tennyson were born. The way was prepared for Browning, as it was for

Shakespeare: as it is, beyond doubt, for the next high peer of these.

There were `Roberts' among the sons of the Browning family for at

least four generations. It has been affirmed, on disputable authority, that

the surname is the English equivalent for Bruning, and that the family is of

Teutonic origin. Possibly: but this origin is too remote to be of any

practical concern. Browning himself, it may be added, told Mr. Moncure

Conway that the original name was De Bruni. It is not a matter of much

importance: the poet was, personally and to a great extent in his genius,

Anglo-Saxon. Though there are plausible grounds for the assumption, I

can find nothing to substantiate the common assertion that, immediately,

or remotely, his people were Jews.*

-- * Fairly conclusive evidence to the contrary, on the paternal side, is

afforded in the fact that, in 1757, the poet's great-grandfather gave one of

his sons the baptismal name of Christian. Dr. Furnivall's latest researches

prove that there is absolutely "no ground for supposing the presence of

any Jewish blood in the poet's veins." --

As to Browning's physiognomy and personal traits, this much may be

granted: if those who knew him were told he was a Jew they would not be

much surprised. In his exuberant vitality, in his sensuous love of music

and the other arts, in his combined imaginativeness and shrewdness of

common sense, in his superficial expansiveness and actual reticence, he

would have been typical enough of the potent and artistic race for whom

he has so often of late been claimed.

What, however, is most to the point is that neither to curious

acquaintances nor to intimate friends, neither to Jews nor Gentiles, did he

ever admit more than that he was a good Protestant, and sprung of a

Puritan stock. He was tolerant of all religious forms, but with a natural

bias towards Anglican Evangelicalism.

In appearance there was, perhaps, something of the Semite in Robert

Browning: yet this is observable but slightly in the portraits of him during

the last twenty years, and scarcely at all in those which represent him as a

young man. It is most marked in the drawing by Rudolf Lehmann,

Life of Robert Browning

representing Browning at the age of forty-seven, where he looks out upon

us with a physiognomy which is, at least, as much distinctively Jewish as

English. Possibly the large dark eyes (so unlike both in colour and shape

what they were in later life) and curved nose and full lips, with the oval

face, may have been, as it were, seen judaically by the artist. These

characteristics, again, are greatly modified in Mr. Lehmann's subsequent

portrait in oils.

The poet's paternal great-grandfather, who was owner of the

Woodyates Inn, in the parish of Pentridge, in Dorsetshire, claimed to come

of good west-country stock. Browning believed, but always

conscientiously maintained there was no proof in support of the

assumption, that he was a descendant of the Captain Micaiah Browning

who, as Macaulay relates in his `History of England', raised the siege of

Derry in 1689 by springing the boom across Lough Foyle, and perished in

the act. The same ancestral line is said to comprise the Captain Browning

who commanded the ship `The Holy Ghost', which conveyed Henry V. to

France before he fought the Battle of Agincourt, and in recognition of

whose services two waves, said to represent waves of the sea, were added

to his coat of arms. It is certainly a point of some importance in the

evidence, as has been indicated, that these arms were displayed by the

gallant Captain Micaiah, and are borne by the present family. That the poet

was a pure-bred Englishman in the strictest sense, however, as has

commonly been asserted, is not the case. His mother was Scottish, through

her mother and by birth, but her father was the son of a German from

Hamburg, named Wiedemann, who, by the way, in connection with his

relationship as maternal grandfather to the poet, it is interesting to note,

was an accomplished draughtsman and musician.* Browning's paternal

grandmother, again, was a Creole. As Mrs. Orr remarks, this pedigree

throws a valuable light on the vigour and variety of the poet's genius.

Possibly the main current of his ancestry is as little strictly English as

German. A friend sends me the following paragraph from a Scottish paper:

-- "What of the Scottish Brownings? I had it long ago from one of the

name that the Brownings came originally from Ayrshire, and that several

families of them emigrated to the North of Ireland during the times of the

Life of Robert Browning

Covenanters. There is, moreover, a small town or village in the North of

Ireland called Browningstown. Might not the poet be related to these

Scottish Brownings?"

-- * It has frequently been stated that Browning's maternal grandfather,

Mr. Wiedemann, was a Jew. Mr. Wiedemann, the son of a Hamburg

merchant, was a small shipowner in Dundee. Had he, or his father, been

Semitic, he would not have baptised one of his daughters `Christiana'. --

Browning's great-grandfather, as indicated above, was a small

proprietor in Dorsetshire. His son, whether perforce or from choice,

removed to London when he was a youth, and speedily obtained a

clerkship in the Bank of England, where he remained for fifty years, till he

was pensioned off in 1821 with over 400 Pounds a year. He died in 1833.

His wife, to whom he was married in or about 1780, was one Margaret

Morris Tittle, a Creole, born in the West Indies. Her portrait, by Wright of

Derby, used to hang in the poet's dining-room. They resided, Mr. R.

Barrett Browning tells me, in Battersea, where his grandfather was their

first-born. The paternal grandfather of the poet decided that his three sons,

Robert, William Shergold, and Reuben, should go into business, the two

younger in London, the elder abroad. All three became efficient financial

clerks, and attained to good positions and fair means.* The eldest, Robert,

was a man of exceptional powers. He was a poet, both in sentiment and

expression; and he understood, as well as enjoyed, the excellent in art. He

was a scholar, too, in a reputable fashion: not indifferent to what he had

learnt in his youth, nor heedless of the high opinion generally entertained

for the greatest writers of antiquity, but with a particular care himself for

Horace and Anacreon. As his son once told a friend, "The old gentleman's

brain was a storehouse of literary and philosophical antiquities. He was

completely versed in mediaeval legend, and seemed to have known

Paracelsus, Faustus, and even Talmudic personages, personally" -- a

significant detail, by the way. He was fond of metrical composition, and

his ease and grace in the use of the heroic couplet were the admiration, not

only of his intellectual associates, but, in later days, of his son, who was

wont to affirm, certainly in all seriousness, that expressionally his father

was a finer poetic artist than himself. Some one has recorded of him that

Life of Robert Browning

he was an authority on the Letters of Junius: fortunately he had more

tangible claims than this to the esteem of his fellows. It was his boast that,

notwithstanding the exigencies of his vocation, he knew as much of the

history of art as any professional critic. His extreme modesty is deducible

from this naive remark. He was an amateur artist, moreover, as well as

poet, critic, and student. I have seen several of his drawings which are

praiseworthy: his studies in portraiture, particularly, are ably touched: and,

as is well known, he had an active faculty of pictorial caricature. In the

intervals of leisure which beset the best regulated clerk he was addicted to

making drawings of the habitual visitors to the Bank of England, in which

he had obtained a post on his return, in 1803, from the West Indies, and in

the enjoyment of which he remained till 1853, when he retired on a small

pension. His son had an independent income, but whether from a bequest,

or in the form of an allowance from his then unmarried Uncle Reuben, is

uncertain. In the first year of his marriage Mr. Browning resided in an old

house in Southampton Street, Peckham, and there the poet was born. The

house was long ago pulled down, and another built on its site. Mr.

Browning afterwards removed to another domicile in the same Peckham

district. Many years later, he and his family left Camberwell and resided at

Hatcham, near New Cross, where his brothers and sisters (by his father's

second marriage) lived. There was a stable attached to the Hatcham house,

and in it Mr. Reuben Browning kept his horse, which he let his poet-

nephew ride, while he himself was at his desk in Rothschild's bank. No

doubt this horse was the `York' alluded to by the poet in the letter quoted,

as a footnote, at page 189 [Chapter 9] of this book. Some years after his

wife's death, which occurred in 1849, Mr. Browning left Hatcham and

came to Paddington, but finally went to reside in Paris, and lived there, in

a small street off the Champs Elysees, till his death in 1866. The Creole

strain seems to have been distinctly noticeable in Mr. Browning, so much

so that it is possible it had something to do with his unwillingness to

remain at St. Kitts, where he was certainly on one occasion treated

cavalierly enough. The poet's complexion in youth, light and ivory-toned

as it was in later life, has been described as olive, and it is said that one of

his nephews, who met him in Paris in his early manhood, took him for an

Life of Robert Browning

Italian. It has been affirmed that it was the emotional Creole strain in

Browning which found expression in his passion for music.**

-- * The three brothers were men of liberal education and literary tastes.

Mr. W. S. Browning, who died in 1874, was an author of some repute. His

`History of the Huguenots' is a standard book on the subject. ** Mrs.

Sutherland Orr, in her "Life and Letters of Robert Browning" (1891), (now

available online) refutes these statements. -- A. L., 1996. --

By old friends of the family I have been told that Mr. Browning had a

strong liking for children, with whom his really remarkable faculty of

impromptu fiction made him a particular favourite. Sometimes he would

supplement his tales by illustrations with pencil or brush. Miss Alice

Corkran has shown me an illustrated coloured map, depictive of the main

incidents and scenery of the `Pilgrim's Progress', which he genially made

for "the children".*

-- * Mrs. Fraser Corkran, who saw much of the poet's father during his

residence in Paris, has spoken to me of his extraordinary analytical faculty

in the elucidation of complex criminal cases. It was once said of him that

his detective faculty amounted to genius. This is a significant trait in the

father of the author of "The Ring and the Book". --

He had three children himself -- Robert, born May 7th, 1812, a

daughter named Sarianna, after her mother, and Clara. His wife was a

woman of singular beauty of nature, with a depth of religious feeling

saved from narrowness of scope only by a rare serenity and a fathomless

charity. Her son's loving admiration of her was almost a passion: even late

in life he rarely spoke of her without tears coming to his eyes. She was,

moreover, of an intellectual bent of mind, and with an artistic bias having

its readiest fulfilment in music, and, to some extent, in poetry. In the latter

she inclined to the Romanticists: her husband always maintained the

supremacy of Pope. He looked with much dubiety upon his son's early

writings, "Pauline" and "Paracelsus"; "Sordello", though he found it

beyond either his artistic or his mental apprehension, he forgave, because

it was written in rhymed couplets; the maturer works he regarded with

sympathy and pride, with a vague admiration which passed into a clearer

understanding only when his long life was drawing near its close.

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LifeofRobertBrowning1LifeofRobertBrowningbyWilliamSharpLifeofRobertBrowning2Note.InallimportantrespectsIleavethisvolumetospeakforitself.Forobviousreasonsitdoesnotpretendtobemorethana`Memoirepourservir':inthenatureofthings,thedefinitivebiographycannotappearformanyyearstocome.NonethelessgratefullymayI...

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