When the youthful ROBERT BROWNING, in 1846, carried off in romantio Robert and secret marriage the most eminent poetess of the age, not a friend suspected Browning that his fame would ever surpass hers. Then, and long afterwards, he was to the world merely "the man who married Elizabeth Barrett," although he had already published most of his dramas, and above all the divine miracle-play of Pippa Passes. By his second book, Paracelsus, he had attracted to him a group of admirers, small in number, but of high discernment; these feil off from

what seemed the stoniness of Strafford and the dense darkness of Sordello. At thirty-five Robert Browning found himself almost without a reader. The fifteen years of his married life, spent mainly in Italy, were years of development, of clarification, of increasing selective power. When he published Men and Women, whatever the critics and the quidnuncs might say, Browning had surpassed his wife and had no living rival except Tennyson. He continued, for nearly forty years, to write and publish verse; he had no other occupation, and the results of his even industry grew into a mountain. After 1864 he was rarely exquisite; but The Ring and the Book, an immense poem in which one incident of Italian crime is shown reflected on a dozen successive mental facets, interested everybody, and ushered Browning for the first time to the great public.

Browning was in advance of his age until he had become an elderly man. His great vogue did not begin until after the period which we deal with in this chapter. From 1870 to 1889 he was an intellectual force of the first class; from 1850 to 1870 he was a curiosity, an eccentric product more wondered at than loved or followed. His analysis was too subtle, and his habit of expression too rapid and transient, for the simple early Victorian mind; before his readers knew what he was saying, he had passed on to some other mood or subject. The question of Browning's obscurity is one which has been discussed until the flesh is weary. He is often difficult to follow; not unfrequently neglectful, in the swift evolution of

his thought, whether the listener can follow him or not: we know that he liked "to dock the smaller parts-o'-speech." In those earlier years of which we speak, he pursued with dignity, but with some disappointment, the rôle of a man moved to sing to others in what they persisted in considering no better than a very exasperating mode of pedestrian speech. So that the pure style in Browning, his exquisite melody when he is melodious, his beauty of diction when he bends to classic forms, the freshness and variety of his pictures-all this was unobserved, or noted only with grudging and inadequate praise.

Robert Browning (1812-1889) was the son of Robert Browning, a clerk in the Bank of England, and his wife, whose maiden name was Wiedemann, the daughter of a Hamburg merchant. He was born at Camberwell on the 7th of May 1812. Early in infancy he showed a native force of character, and soon began to make rhymes, at first under the influence of Byron. In 1825, however, he became acquainted with the writings of Shelley and Keats, and abandoned his Byronism. He attended a school at Peckham for some time, but the main part of his education was carried out at home. He went neither to public school nor university (except for a very short time to classes at University College, London), and he declined to adopt any profession, his design from the first being to be a poet and nothing else. His earliest publication, Pauline, appeared anonymously in January 1833, but fell still-born from the press. Browning spent the following winter in St. Petersburg, where he wrote "Porphyria's Lover" and "Johannes Agricola." He then proceeded to Italy, and saw Venice and perhaps

Robert Browning

Asolo for the first time. He returned to London, and in 1835 he published Paracelsus, which introduced him to the world of letters. In 1836, at the request of Macready, he wrote his tragedy of Strafford, which was printed and produced at Covent Garden Theatre in May 1837, but only ran five nights. He was already writing Sordello, which he took with him unfinished when he started for Italy in 18,8; and a great many of his best lyrics belong to this year. Sordello was published in 1840, and was received with mockery; as the most tightly-compressed and abstrusely dark of

all Browning's writings, it is responsible for much of the outcry against his "obscurity."

my

PAULINE;

FRAGMENT OF A CONFESSION.

The poet was not discouraged, but "he was now entering on a period of general neglect which covered nearly twenty years of his life." It was proposed to him by Moxon that he should print his poems and plays, for the sake of economy, as doublecolumn pamphlets, and the result was the production of Bells and Pomegranates, in the eight numbers of which (1841-1846) the bulk of his early lyrical and dramatic work appeared. One of these famous numbers contained Pippa Passes, and another The Blot in the Scutcheon, written in 1843, at the desire of Macready, but not played by him, but by Phelps, in whose hands it achieved a partial success at Drury Lane. It was "underacted," and there followed a quarrel between the poet and Macready. During the casual publication of l'ells and Tomegranates, Browning started a third time for Italy. It was on his return, and in the course of the opening week of 1845, that Browning first read the poems of his already celebrated contem

Plus de suis ce que j'a été,

Et ne le sçaurois jamais étre
MAROT

LONDON

SAUNDERS AND OTLEY, CONDUIT STREET
1833

Title-page of "Pauline," 1833, with
an Autograph Inscription

porary, Elizabeth Barrett. He was impelled to write to her, and in his very first letter (January 10) he wrote. "I love your books, and I love you too." He did not meet her until May 20, 1845, and they became engaged later in the year. It was not, however, until September 12, 1846, that they were privately married, and a week later left England for Paris and Italy, where they settled at first in Pisa. In 1848, tired of furnished rooms, the Brownings took an apartment in the Casa Guidi, in Florence, which continued to be their home. In 1850 Browning published Christmas Eve and Easter Day, and in 1852 a critical preface to a volume of letters by Shelley, which to his unceasing chagrin presently proved to be forgeries. In 1853 his play of Columbe's Birthday was performed at the Haymarket, and In a Balcony was written

at Bagni di Lucca. All this time the Brownings were liable to embarrassment for want

of money, but even though obliged to stay "transfixed" when they would have preferred to travel, they lived a very tranquil and happy life "on their own sofas and chairs, among their own nightingales and fireflies." A very important work, Men and Women, was published in two volumes in 1855. In 1856 the death of Kenyon, who left handsome legacies to the Brownings, lifted them above the fear of poverty; unhappily the steady decline of Mrs. Browning's health proved a much more serious

cause of anxiety. She died on the 29th of June 1861, and Browning determined to return to England; early in 1862 he took a house, 19 Warwick Crescent, in which he lived for more than a quarter of a century. During the last named year he scarcely saw any friends, living a life of disconsolate seclusion; in 1863, however, he determined that this mode of life was morbid and unworthy, and he began to mix in general society. Travelling independently in the north of France, by a most extraordinary coincidence, Tennyson and Browning both failed to catch a train, and thus escaped taking part in a terrible railway accident, which was fatal to a large number of persons. Browning now made it his habit to spend his summers on the coast of Brittany, a course which not merely soothed and refreshed his spirits, but proved exceedingly favourable to the composition of his poetry. Thus the greater part of Dramatis Persona, which appeared in 1864, had been written at Pornic, while at Croisic he worked in successive summers on "that great venture, the murder-poem" of The Ring and the Book (1868-69). The publication of this work, in four volumes, was a triumph. for Browning, who now, for the first time, saw himself really eminent. Even the FrancoGerman war did not cure Browning of his wish to spend the summer on the French coast, and he was at St. Aubin, near Havre, in 1870, when it became necessary for him to escape with his family in a cattle-boat from Honfleur to Southampton, and he returned to the same spot the next year. In 1871 he was very active; in the course of this year were published Hervé Kiel, Balaustion's Adventure, and Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau. The next four years saw the regular publication of a volume

Photo]

Robert Browning

[W. H. Grove

each, Fifine at the Fair, Red Cotton Night-cap Country, Aristophanes Apology, and The Inn Album. Browning now gave himself up for some time to a study of the Greek dramatists, and in 1877 produced, at the suggestion of Carlyle, a grotesque version of the Agamemnon. In 1878 he received a great shock in the sudden death of his closest friend, Miss Egerton-Smith. The impression made on him by this event is recorded in La Saisiaz. Later in the same year he went to Italy again, for the first time since his wife's death, and for the remainder of his life he visited Italy, and especially the Veneto, as often and for as long a time as possible. He was now universally famous at last, and for the closing ten years of his career he

The Palazzo Rezzonico, Venice, where Browning died, December 12, 1889 lived in the consciousness of having become within his lifetime a classic, beloved and discussed. He continued to write and to publish volumes of poems with considerable regularity. Of these last fruits of his genius, Jocoseria (1883) and Ferishtah's Fancies (1884) were particularly characteristic. In these years he spent a great part of each year in Venice, and in 1887 he purchased the Palazzo Rezzonico in that city, intending to make it his residence. It was there that he died, after a brief illness, on the 12th of December 1889, his last volume of poems, Asolando, being published in London on the same day. Four days later the body was brought to London, after a stately public funeral in Venice, and was buried on the 31st of December in Westminster Abbey. In physique Robert Browning was short and thick-set, of a very muscular build; his temper was ardent and optimistic; he was appreciative, sympathetic, and full of curiosity; prudent in affairs, and rather "close" about money; robust, active, loud of

VOL. IV.

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