CHAPTER 9. It is needless to dwell upon what followed. The world has all that need

CHAPTER 9. It is needless to dwell upon what followed. The world has all that need be known. To Browning himself it was the abrupt, the too deeply pathetic, yet not wholly unhappy ending of a lovelier poem than any he or another should ever write, the poem of their married life. There is a rare serenity in the thought of death when it is known to be the gate of life. This conviction Browning had, and so his grief was rather that of one whose joy has westered earlier. The sweetest music of his life had withdrawn: but there was still music for one to whom life in itself was a happiness. He had his son, and was not void of other solace: but even had it been otherwise he was of the strenuous natures who never succumb, nor wish to die -- whatever accident of mortality overcome the will and the power. It was in the autumn following his wife's death that he wrote the noble poem to which allusion has already been made: "Prospice". Who does not thrill to its close, when all of gloom or terror "Shall change, shall become first a peace out of pain, Then a light, then thy breast, O thou soul of my soul! I shall clasp thee again, And with God be the rest." There are few direct allusions to his wife in Browning's poems. Of those prior to her death the most beautiful is "One Word More", which has been already quoted in part: of the two or three subsequent to that event none surpasses the magic close of the first part of "The Ring and the Book". Thereafter the details of his life are public property. He all along lived in the light, partly from his possession of that serenity which made Goethe glad to be alive and to be able to make others share in that gladness. No poet has been more revered and more loved. His personality will long be a stirring tradition. In the presence of his simple manliness and wealth of all generous qualities one is inclined to pass by as valueless, as the mere flying spray of the welcome shower, the many honours and gratifications that befell him. Even if these things mattered, concerning one by whose genius we are fascinated, while undazzled by the mere accidents pertinent

120 thereto, their recital would be wearisome -- of how he was asked to be Lord Rector of this University, or made a doctor of laws at that: of how letters and tributes of all kinds came to him from every district in our Empire, from every country in the world: and so forth. All these things are implied in the circumstance that his life was throughout "a noble music with a golden ending." In 1866 his father died in Paris, strenuous in life until the very end. After this event Miss Sarianna Browning went to reside with her brother, and from that time onward was his inseparable companion, and ever one of the dearest and most helpful of friends. In latter years brother and sister were constantly seen together, and so regular attendants were they at such functions as the "Private Views" at the Royal Academy and Grosvenor Gallery, that these never seemed complete without them. A Private View, a first appearance of Joachim or Sarasate, a first concert of Richter or Henschel or Halle, at each of these, almost to a certainty, the poet was sure to appear. The chief personal happiness of his later life was in his son. Mr. R. Barrett Browning is so well known as a painter and sculptor that it would be superfluous for me to add anything further here, except to state that his successes were his father's keenest pleasures. Two years after his father's death, that is in 1868, the "Poetical Works of Robert Browning, M.A., Honorary Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford", were issued in six volumes. Here the equator of Browning's genius may be drawn. On the further side lie the "Men and Women" of the period anterior to "The Ring and the Book": midway is the transitional zone itself: on the hither side are the "Men and Women" of a more temperate if not colder clime. The first part of "The Ring and the Book" was not published till November. In September the poet was staying with his sister and son at Le Croisic, a picturesque village at the mouth of the Loire, at the end of the great salt plains which stretch down from Guerande to the Bay of Biscay. No doubt, in lying on the sand-dunes in the golden September glow, in looking upon the there somewhat turbid current of the Loire, the poet brooded on those days when he saw its inland waters with her who was with him no longer save in dreams and memories. Here he wrote that

121 stirring poem, "Herve Riel", founded upon the valorous action of a French sailor who frustrated the naval might of England, and claimed nothing as a reward save permission to have a holiday on land to spend a few hours with his wife, "la belle Aurore". "Herve Riel" (which has been translated into French, and is often recited, particularly in the maritime towns, and is always evocative of enthusiastic applause) is one of Browning's finest action-lyrics, and is assured of the same immortality as "How they brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix", or the "Pied Piper" himself. In 1872 there was practical proof of the poet's growing popularity. Baron Tauchnitz issued two volumes of excellently selected poems, comprising some of the best of "Men and Women", "Dramatis Personae", and "Dramatic Romances", besides the longer "Soul's Tragedy", "Luria", "In a Balcony", and "Christmas Eve and Easter Day" -- the most Christian poem of the century, according to one eminent cleric, the heterodox self- sophistication of a free-thinker, according to another: really, the reflex of a great crisis, that of the first movement of the tide of religious thought to a practically limitless freedom. This edition also contained "Bishop Blougram", then much discussed, apart from its poetic and intellectual worth, on account of its supposed verisimilitude in portraiture of Cardinal Wiseman. This composition, one of Browning's most characteristic, is so clever that it is scarcely a poem. Poetry and Cleverness do not well agree, the muse being already united in perfect marriage to Imagination. In his Essay on Truth, Bacon says that one of the Fathers called poetry `Vinum Daemonum', because it filleth the imagination. Certainly if it be not `vinum daemonum' it is not Poetry. In this year also appeared the first series of "Selections" by the poet's latest publishers: "Dedicated to Alfred Tennyson. In Poetry -- illustrious and consummate: In Friendship -- noble and sincere." It was in his preface to this selection that he wrote the often-quoted words: "Nor do I apprehend any more charges of being wilfully obscure, unconscientiously careless, or perversely harsh." At or about the date of these "Selections" the poet wrote to a friend, on this very point of obscurity, "I can have little doubt that my writing has been in the main too hard for many I should have been pleased to communicate with; but I never designedly tried to

122 puzzle people, as some of my critics have supposed. On the other hand, I never pretended to offer such literature as should be a substitute for a cigar or a game at dominoes to an idle man. So perhaps, on the whole, I get my deserts, and something over -- not a crowd, but a few I value more." In 1877 Browning, ever restless for pastures new, went with his sister to spend the autumn at La Saisiaz (Savoyard for "the sun"), a villa among the mountains near Geneva; this time with the additional company of Miss Anne Egerton Smith, an intimate and valued friend. But there was an unhappy close to the holiday. Miss Smith died on the night of the fourteenth of September, from heart complaint. "La Saisiaz" is the direct outcome of this incident, and is one of the most beautiful of Browning's later poems. Its trochaics move with a tide-like sound. At the close, there is a line which might stand as epitaph for the poet -- "He, at least, believed in Soul, was very sure of God." In the following year "La Saisiaz" was published along with "The Two Poets of Croisic", which was begun and partly written at the little French village ten years previously. There is nothing of the eight-score stanzas of the "Two Poets" to equal its delightful epilogue, or the exquisite prefatory lyric, beginning "Such a starved bank of moss Till that May-morn Blue ran the flash across: Violets were born." Extremely interesting -- and for myself I cannot find "The Two Poets of Croisic" to be anything more than "interesting" -- it is as a poem distinctly inferior to "La Saisiaz". Although detached lines are often far from truly indicative of the real poetic status of a long poem, where proportion and harmony are of more importance than casual exfoliations of beauty, yet to a certain extent they do serve as musical keys that give the fundamental tone. One certainly would have to search in vain to find in the Croisic poem such lines as "Five short days, scarce enough to Bronze the clustered wilding apple, redden ripe the mountain ash." Or these of Mont Blanc, seen at sunset, towering over icy pinnacles and teeth-like peaks, "Blanc, supreme above his earth-brood, needles red and white and green, Horns of silver, fangs of crystal set on edge in his demesne." Or, again, this of the sun swinging himself above the dark shoulder of Jura -- "Gay he hails her, and magnific, thrilled her black length burns to gold."

123 Or, finally, this sounding verse -- "Past the city's congregated peace of homes and pomp of spires." The other poems later than "The Ring and the Book" are, broadly speaking, of two kinds. On the one side may be ranged the groups which really cohere with "Men and Women". These are "The Inn Album", the miscellaneous poems of the "Pacchiarotto" volume, the "Dramatic Idyls", some of "Jocoseria", and some of "Asolando". "Ferishtah's Fancies" and "Parleyings" are not, collectively, dramatic poems, but poems of illuminative insight guided by a dramatic imagination.* They, and the classical poems and translations (renderings, rather, by one whose own individuality dominates them to the exclusion of that NEARNESS of the original author, which it should be the primary aim of the translator to evoke), the beautiful "Balaustion's Adventure", "Aristophanes' Apology", and "The Agamemnon of Aeschylus", and the third group, which comprises "Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau", "Red Cotton Nightcap Country", and "Fifine at the Fair" -- these three groups are of the second kind. -- * In a letter to a friend, Browning wrote: -- "I hope and believe that one or two careful readings of the Poem [Ferishtah's Fancies] will make its sense clear enough. Above all, pray allow for the Poet's inventiveness in any case, and do not suppose there is more than a thin disguise of a few Persian names and allusions. There was no such person as Ferishtah -- the stories are all inventions. . . . The Hebrew quotations are put in for a purpose, as a direct acknowledgment that certain doctrines may be found in the Old Book, which the Concocters of Novel Schemes of Morality put forth as discoveries of their own." -- Remarkable as are the three last-named productions, it is extremely doubtful if the first and second will be read for pleasure by readers born after the close of this century. As it is impossible, in my narrow limits, to go into any detail about poems which personally I do not regard as essential to the truest understanding of Browning, the truest because on the highest level, that of poetry -- as distinct from dogma, or intellectual suasion of any kind that might, for all its aesthetic charm, be in prose -- it would be presumptuous to assert anything derogatory of them without

124 attempting adequate substantiation. I can, therefore, merely state my own opinion. To reiterate, it is that, for different reasons, these three long poems are foredoomed to oblivion -- not, of course, to be lost to the student of our literature and of our age, a more wonderful one even than that of the Renaissance, but to lapse from the general regard. That each will for a long time find appreciative readers is certain. They have a fascination for alert minds, and they have not infrequent ramifications which are worth pursuing for the glimpses afforded into an always evanishing Promised Land. "Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau" (the name, by the way, is not purely fanciful, being formed from Hohen Schwangau, one of the castles of the late King of Bavaria) is Browning's complement to his wife's "Ode to Napoleon III." "Red Cotton Nightcap Country" is a true story, the narrative of the circumstances pertinent to the tragic death of one Antonio Mellerio, a Paris jeweller, which occurred in 1870 at St. Aubin in Normandy, where, indeed, the poet first heard of it in all its details. It is a story which, if the method of poetry and the method of prose could for a moment be accepted as equivalent, might be said to be of the school of a light and humorously grotesque Zola. It has the fundamental weakness of "The Ring and the Book" -- the weakness of an inadequate ethical basis. It is, indeed, to that great work what a second-rate novelette is to a masterpiece of fiction. "Fifine at the Fair", on the other hand, is so powerful and often so beautiful a poem that one would be rash indeed were he, with the blithe critical assurance which is so generally snuffed out like a useless candle by a later generation, to prognosticate its inevitable seclusion from the high place it at present occupies in the estimate of the poet's most uncompromising admirers. But surely equally rash is the assertion that it will be the "poem of the future". However, our concern is not with problematical estimates, but with the poem as it appears to US. It is one of the most characteristic of Browning's productions. It would be impossible for the most indolent reader or critic to attribute it, even if anonymous, to another parentage. Coleridge alludes somewhere to certain verses of Wordsworth's, with the declaration that if he had met them howling in the desert he would have recognised their authorship. "Fifine" would not even

125 have to howl. Browning was visiting Pornic one autumn, when he saw the gipsy who was the original of "Fifine". In the words of Mrs. Orr, "his fancy was evidently set roaming by the gipsy's audacity, her strength -- the contrast which she presented to the more spiritual types of womanhood; and this contrast eventually found expression in a pathetic theory of life, in which these opposite types and their corresponding modes of attraction became the necessary complement of each other. As he laid down the theory, Mr. Browning would be speaking in his own person. But he would turn into some one else in the act of working it out -- for it insensibly carried with it a plea for yielding to those opposite attractions, not only successively, but at the same time; and a modified Don Juan would grow up under his pen." One drawback to an unconditional enjoyment of Balzac is that every now and again the student of the `Comedie Humaine' resents the too obvious display of the forces that propel the effect -- a lesser phase of the weariness which ensues upon much reading of the mere "human documents" of the Goncourt school of novelists. In the same way, we too often see Browning working up the electrical qualities, so that, when the fulmination comes, we understand "just how it was produced," and, as illogically as children before a too elaborate conjurer, conclude that there is not so much in this particular poetic feat as in others which, like Herrick's maids, continually do deceive. To me this is affirmable of "Fifine at the Fair". The poet seems to know so very well what he is doing. If he did not take the reader so much into his confidence, if he would rely more upon the liberal grace of his earlier verse and less upon the trained subtlety of his athletic intellect, the charm would be the greater. The poem would have a surer duration as one of the author's greater achievements, if there were more frequent and more prolonged insistence on the note struck in the lines (Section 73) about the hill-stream, infant of mist and dew, falling over the ledge of the fissured cliff to find its fate in smoke below, as it disappears into the deep, "embittered evermore, to make the sea one drop more big thereby:" or in the cloudy splendour of the description of nightfall (Section 106): or in the windy spring freshness of "Hence, when the earth began afresh its life in May, And fruit-trees bloomed, and waves

126 would wanton, and the bay Ruffle its wealth of weed, and stranger-birds arrive, And beasts take each a mate." . . . But its chief fault seems to me to be its lack of that transmutive glow of rhythmic emotion without which no poem can endure. This rhythmic energy is, inherently, a distinct thing from intellectual emotion. Metric music may be alien to the adequate expression of the latter, whereas rhythmic emotion can have no other appropriate issue. Of course, in a sense, all creative art is rhythmic in kind: but here I am speaking only of that creative energy which evolves the germinal idea through the medium of language. The energy of the intellect under creative stimulus may produce lordly issues in prose: but poetry of a high intellectual order can be the outcome only of an intellect fused to white heat, of intellectual emotion on fire -- as, in the fine saying of George Meredith, passion is noble strength on fire. Innumerable examples could be taken from any part of the poem, but as it would not be just to select the most obviously defective passages, here are two which are certainly fairly representative of the general level -- "And I became aware, scarcely the word escaped my lips, that swift ensued in silence and by stealth, and yet with certitude, a formidable change of the amphitheatre which held the Carnival; ALTHOUGH THE HUMAN STIR CONTINUED JUST THE SAME AMID THAT SHIFT OF SCENE." (No. 105) "And where i' the world is all this wonder, you detail so trippingly, espied? My mirror would reflect a tall, thin, pale, deep-eyed personage, pretty once, it may be, doubtless still loving -- a certain grace yet lingers if you will -- but all this wonder, where?" (No. 40) Here, and in a hundred other such passages, we have the rhythm, if not of the best prose, at least not that of poetry. Will "Fifine" and poems of its kind stand re-reading, re-perusal over and over? That is one of the most definite tests. In the pressure of life can we afford much time to anything but the very best -- nay, to the vast mass even of that which closely impinges thereupon? For myself, in the instance of "Fifine", I admit that if re-perusal be controlled by pleasure I am content (always excepting a few scattered noble passages) with the Prologue and Epilogue. A little volume of those Summaries of Browning's -- how stimulating a companion it would be in

127 those hours when the mind would fain breathe a more liberal air! As for "Jocoseria",* it seems to me the poorest of Browning's works, and I cannot help thinking that ultimately the only gold grain discoverable therein will be "Ixion", the beautiful penultimate poem beginning -- "Never the time and the place And the loved one altogether;" and the thrush-like overture, closing -- "What of the leafage, what of the flower? Roses embowering with nought they embower! Come then! complete incompletion, O comer, Pant through the blueness, perfect the summer! Breathe but one breath Rose-beauty above, And all that was death Grows life, grows love, Grows love!" -- * In a letter to a friend, along with an early copy of this book, Browning stated that "the title is taken from the work of Melander (`Schwartzmann'), reviewed, by a curious coincidence, in the `Blackwood' of this month. I referred to it in a note to `Paracelsus'. The two Hebrew quotations (put in to give a grave look to what is mere fun and invention) being translated amount to (1) `A Collection of Many Lies': and (2), an old saying, `From Moses to Moses arose none like Moses' . . . ." -- In 1881 the "Browning Society" was established. It is easy to ridicule any institution of the kind -- much easier than to be considerate of other people's earnest convictions and aims, or to be helpful to their object. There is always a ridiculous side to excessive enthusiasm, particularly obvious to persons incapable of enthusiasm of any kind. With some mistakes, and not a few more or less grotesque absurdities, the members of the various English and American Browning Societies are yet to be congratulated on the good work they have, collectively, accomplished. Their publications are most interesting and suggestive: ultimately they will be invaluable. The members have also done a good work in causing some of Browning's plays to be produced again on the stage, and in Miss Alma Murray and others have found sympathetic and able exponents of some of the poet's most attractive `dramatis personae'. There can be no question as to the powerful impetus given by the Society to Browning's steadily- increasing popularity. Nothing shows his judicious good sense more than the letter he wrote, privately, to Mr. Edmund Yates, at the time of the Society's foundation.

128 == "The Browning Society, I need not say, as well as Browning himself, are fair game for criticism. I had no more to do with the founding it than the babe unborn; and, as Wilkes was no Wilkeite, I am quite other than a Browningite. But I cannot wish harm to a society of, with a few exceptions, names unknown to me, who are busied about my books so disinterestedly. The exaggerations probably come of the fifty-years'-long charge of unintelligibility against my books; such reactions are possible, though I never looked for the beginning of one so soon. That there is a grotesque side to the thing is certain; but I have been surprised and touched by what cannot but have been well intentioned, I think. Anyhow, as I never felt inconvenienced by hard words, you will not expect me to wax bumptious because of undue compliment: so enough of `Browning', -- except that he is yours very truly, `while this machine is to him.'" == The latter years of the poet were full of varied interest for himself, but present little of particular significance for specification in a monograph so concise as this must perforce be. Every year he went abroad, to France or to Italy, and once or twice on a yachting trip in the Mediterranean.* At home -- for many years, at 19 Warwick Crescent, in what some one has called the dreary Mesopotamia of Paddington, and for the last three or four years of his life at 29 De Vere Gardens, Kensington Gore -- his avocations were so manifold that it is difficult to understand where he had leisure for his vocation. Everybody wished him to come to dine; and he did his utmost to gratify Everybody. He saw everything; read all the notable books; kept himself acquainted with the leading contents of the journals and magazines; conducted a large correspondence; read new French, German, and Italian books of mark; read and translated Euripides and Aeschylus; knew all the gossip of the literary clubs, salons, and the studios; was a frequenter of afternoon-tea parties; and then, over and above it, he was Browning: the most profoundly subtle mind that has exercised itself in poetry since Shakespeare. His personal grace and charm of manner never failed. Whether he was dedicating "Balaustion's Adventure" in terms of gracious courtesy, or handing a flower from some jar of roses, or lilies, or his favourite daffodils, with a bright smile or merry glance, to the lady of his regard, or when sending a copy of a new book of poetry with an

129 accompanying letter expressed with rare felicity, or when generously prophesying for a young poet the only true success if he will but listen and act upon "the inner voice", -- he was in all these, and in all things, the ideal gentleman. There is so charming and characteristic a touch in the following note to a girl-friend, that I must find room for it: -- -- * It was on his first experience of this kind, more than a quarter of a century earlier, that he wrote the nobly patriotic lines of "Home Thoughts from the Sea", and that flawless strain of bird-music, "Home Thoughts from Abroad": then, also, that he composed "How they brought the Good News". Concerning the last, he wrote, in 1881 (see `The Academy', April 2nd), "There is no sort of historical foundation about [this poem]. I wrote it under the bulwark of a vessel off the African coast, after I had been at it long enough to appreciate even the fancy of a gallop on the back of a certain good horse, `York', then in my stable at home. It was written in pencil on the fly-leaf of Bartoli's `Simboli', I remember." -- == 29 De Vere Gardens, W., 6th July 1889. My beloved Alma, -- I had the honour yesterday of dining with the Shah, whereupon the following dialogue: -- "Vous e^tes poe"te?" "On s'est permis de me le dire quelquefois." "Et vous avez fait des livres?" "Trop de livres." "Voulez-vous m'en donner un, afin que je puisse me ressouvenir de vous?" "Avec plaisir." I have been accordingly this morning to town, where the thing is procurable, and as I chose a volume of which I judged the binding might take the imperial eye, I said to myself, "Here do I present my poetry to a personage for whom I do not care three straws; why should I not venture to do as much for a young lady I love dearly, who, for the author's sake, will not impossibly care rather for the inside than the outside of the volume?" So I was bold enough to take one and offer it for your kind acceptance, begging you to remember in days to come that the author, whether a good poet or no, was always, my Alma, your affectionate friend,

130 Robert Browning. == His look was a continual and serene gleam. Lamartine, who remarks this of Bossuet in his youth, adds a phrase which, as observant acquaintances of the poet will agree, might be written of Browning -- "His lips quivered often without utterance, as if with the wind of an internal speech." Except for the touching and beautiful letter which he wrote from Asolo about two months before his death, to Mr. Wilfrid Meynell, about a young writer to whom the latter wished to draw the poet's kindly attention -- a letter which has a peculiar pathos in the words, "I shall soon depart for Venice, on my way homeward" -- except for this letter there is none so well worth repetition here as his last word to the Poet-Laureate. The friendship between these two great poets has in itself the fragrance of genius. The letter was written just before Browning left London. == 29 De Vere Gardens, W., August 5th, 1889. My dear Tennyson, -- To-morrow is your birthday -- indeed, a memorable one. Let me say I associate myself with the universal pride of our country in your glory, and in its hope that for many and many a year we may have your very self among us -- secure that your poetry will be a wonder and delight to all those appointed to come after. And for my own part, let me further say, I have loved you dearly. May God bless you and yours. At no moment from first to last of my acquaintance with your works, or friendship with yourself, have I had any other feeling, expressed or kept silent, than this which an opportunity allows me to utter -- that I am and ever shall be, my dear Tennyson, admiringly and affectionately yours, Robert Browning. == Shortly after this he was at Asolo once more, the little hill-town in the Veneto, which he had visited in his youth, and where he heard again the echo of Pippa's song -- "God's in His heaven, All's right with the world!" Mr. W. W. Story writes to me that he spent three days with the poet at this time, and that the latter seemed, except for a slight asthma, to be as vigorous in mind and body as ever. Thence, later in the autumn, he went to Venice, to join his son and daughter-in-law at the home where he was "to

131 have a corner for his old age," the beautiful Palazzo Rezzonico, on the Grand Canal. He was never happier, more sanguine, more joyous, than here. He worked for three or four hours each morning, walked daily for about two hours, crossed occasionally to the Lido with his sister, and in the evenings visited friends or went to the opera. But for some time past, his heart -- always phenomenally slow in its action, and of late ominously intermittent -- had been noticeably weaker. As he suffered no pain and little inconvenience, he paid no particular attention to the matter. Browning had as little fear of death as doubt in God. In a controlling Providence he did indeed profoundly believe. He felt, with Joubert, that "it is not difficult to believe in God, if one does not worry oneself to define Him."* -- * "Browning's `orthodoxy' brought him into many a combat with his rationalistic friends, some of whom could hardly believe that he took his doctrine seriously. Such was the fact, however; indeed, I have heard that he once stopped near an open-air assembly which an atheist was haranguing, and, in the freedom of his `incognito', gave strenuous battle to the opinions uttered. To one who had spoken of an expected `Judgment Day' as a superstition, I heard him say: `I don't see that. Why should there not be a settling day in the universe, as when a master settles with his workmen at the end of the week?' There was something in his tone and manner which suggested his dramatic conception of religious ideas and ideals." -- Moncure D. Conway. -- "How should externals satisfy my soul?" was his cry in "Sordello", and it was the fundamental strain of all his poetry, as the fundamental motive is expressible in "-- a loving worm within its sod Were diviner than a loveless god Amid his worlds" -- love being with him the golden key wherewith to unlock the world of the universe, of the soul, of all nature. He is as convinced of the two absolute facts of God and Soul as Cardinal Newman in writing of "Two and two only, supreme and luminously self- evident beings, myself and my Creator." Most fervently he believes that "Haply for us the ideal dawn shall break . . . And set our pulse in tune with moods divine" -- though, co-equally, in the necessity of "making man sole sponsor of himself." Ever and again, of course, he was betrayed by the

132 bewildering and defiant puzzle of life: seeing in the face of the child the seed of sorrow, "in the green tree an ambushed flame, in Phosphor a vaunt-guard of Night." Yet never of him could be written that thrilling saying which Sainte-Beuve uttered of Pascal, "That lost traveller who yearns for home, who, strayed without a guide in a dark forest, takes many times the wrong road, goes, returns upon his steps, is discouraged, sits down at a crossing of the roads, utters cries to which no one responds, resumes his march with frenzy and pain, throws himself upon the ground and wants to die, and reaches home at last only after all sorts of anxieties and after sweating blood." No darkness, no tempest, no gloom, long confused his vision of `the ideal dawn'. As the carrier-dove is often baffled, yet ere long surely finds her way through smoke and fog and din to her far country home, so he too, however distraught, soon or late soared to untroubled ether. He had that profound inquietude, which the great French critic says `attests a moral nature of a high rank, and a mental nature stamped with the seal of the archangel.' But, unlike Pascal -- who in Sainte-Beuve's words exposes in the human mind itself two abysses, "on one side an elevation toward God, toward the morally beautiful, a return movement toward an illustrious origin, and on the other side an abasement in the direction of evil" -- Browning sees, believes in, holds to nothing short of the return movement, for one and all, toward an illustrious origin. The crowning happiness of a happy life was his death in the city he loved so well, in the arms of his dear ones, in the light of a world-wide fame. The silence to which the most eloquent of us must all one day lapse came upon him like the sudden seductive twilight of the Tropics, and just when he had bequeathed to us one of his finest utterances. It seems but a day or two ago that the present writer heard from the lips of the dead poet a mockery of death's vanity -- a brave assertion of the glory of life. "Death, death! It is this harping on death I despise so much," he remarked with emphasis of gesture as well as of speech -- the inclined head and body, the right hand lightly placed upon the listener's knee, the abrupt change in the inflection of the voice, all so characteristic of him -- "this idle and often cowardly as well as ignorant harping! Why should we not change like everything else? In fiction, in poetry, in so much of both,

133 French as well as English, and, I am told, in American art and literature, the shadow of death -- call it what you will, despair, negation, indifference -- is upon us. But what fools who talk thus! Why, `amico mio', you know as well as I that death is life, just as our daily, our momentarily dying body is none the less alive and ever recruiting new forces of existence. Without death, which is our crapelike churchyardy word for change, for growth, there could be no prolongation of that which we call life. Pshaw! it is foolish to argue upon such a thing even. For myself, I deny death as an end of everything. Never say of me that I am dead!" On the evening of Thursday, the 12th of December (1889), he was in bed, with exceeding weakness. In the centre of the lofty ceiling of the room in which he lay, and where it had been his wont to work, there is a painting by his son. It depicts an eagle struggling with a serpent, and is illustrative of a superb passage in Shelley's "Revolt of Islam". What memories, what deep thoughts, it must have suggested; how significant, to us, the circumstance! But weak as the poet was, he yet did not see the shadow which had begun to chill the hearts of the watchers. Shortly before the great bell of San Marco struck ten, he turned and asked if any news had come concerning "Asolando", published that day. His son read him a telegram from the publishers, telling how great the demand was and how favourable were the advance-articles in the leading papers. The dying poet smiled and muttered, "How gratifying!" When the last toll of St. Mark's had left a deeper stillness than before, those by the bedside saw a yet profounder silence on the face of him whom they loved.

-------- It is needless to dwell upon the grief everywhere felt and expressed for the irreparable loss. The magnificent closing lines of Shelley's "Alastor" must have occurred to many a mourner; for gone, indeed, was "a surpassing Spirit". The superb pomp of the Venetian funeral, the solemn grandeur of the interment in Westminster Abbey, do not seem worth recording: so insignificant are all these accidents of death made by the supreme fact itself. Yet it is fitting to know that Venice has never in modern times afforded a more impressive sight, than those craped processional gondolas following the high flower-strewn funeral-barge

134 through the thronged waterways and out across the lagoon to the desolate Isle of the Dead: that London has rarely seen aught more solemn than the fog-dusked Cathedral spaces, echoing at first with the slow tramp of the pall-bearers, and then with the sweet aerial music swaying upward the loved familiar words of the `Lyric Voice' hushed so long before. Yet the poet was as much honoured by those humble friends, Lambeth artisans and a few poor working-women, who threw sprays of laurel before the hearse -- by that desolate, starving, woe-weary gentleman, shivering in his threadbare clothes, who seemed transfixed with a heart-wrung though silent emotion, ere he hurriedly drew from his sleeve a large white chrysanthemum, and throwing it beneath the coffin as it was lifted inward, disappeared in the crowd, which closed again like the sea upon this lost wandering wave. Who would not honour this mighty dead? All who could be present were there, somewhere in the ancient Abbey. One of the greatest, loved and admired by the dead poet, had already put the mourning of many into the lofty dignity of his verse: -- "Now dumb is he who waked the world to speak, And voiceless hands the world beside his bier, Our words are sobs, our cry of praise a tear: We are the smitten mortal, we the weak. We see a spirit on Earth's loftiest peak Shine, and wing hence the way he makes more clear: See a great Tree of Life that never sere Dropped leaf for aught that age or storms might wreak: Such ending is not Death: such living shows What wide illumination brightness sheds From one big heart -- to conquer man's old foes: The coward, and the tyrant, and the force Of all those weedy monsters raising heads When Song is murk from springs of turbid source."* -- * George Meredith. -- One word more of "light and fleeting shadow". In the greatness of his nature he must be ranked with Milton, Defoe, and Scott. His very shortcomings, such as they were, were never baneful growths, but mere weeds, with a certain pleasant though pungent savour moreover, growing upon a rich, an exuberant soil. Pluck one of the least lovely -- rather call it the unworthy arrow shot at the body of a dead comrade, so innocent of ill intent: yet it too has a beauty of its own, for the shaft was aflame from the

135 fulness of a heart whose love had withstood the chill passage of the years.

-------- On the night of Browning's death a new star suddenly appeared in Orion.* The coincidence is suggestive if we like to indulge in the fancy that in that constellation -- "No more subjected to the change or chance Of the unsteady planets ----" gleam those other "abodes where the Immortals are." Certainly, a wandering fire has passed away from us. Whither has it gone? To that new star in Orion: or whirled to remote silences in the trail of lost meteors? Whence, and for how long, will its rays reach our storm and gloom-beleaguered earth? -- * Mrs. Orr disputes this statement. -- A. L., 1996.

136 answer yet for the generality, whose decisive franchise will elect a fit arbiter in due time. So, for myself, let me summarise what I have already written in several sections of this book, and particularly in the closing pages of