Browning’s confidences, what there were of them, immediately after his wife’s death were given to several women–
friends; all his life, indeed, he was chiefly intimate with women. The two most intimate of these were his own sister, who
remained with him in all his later years, and the sister of his wife, who seven years afterwards passed away in his
presence as Elizabeth had done. The other letters, which number only one or two, referring in any personal manner to
his bereavement are addressed to Miss Haworth and Isa Blagden. He left Florence and remained for a time with his
father and sister near Dinard. Then he returned to London and took up his residence in Warwick Crescent. Naturally
enough, the thing for which he now chiefly lived was the education of his son, and it is characteristic of Browning that he
was not only a very indulgent father, but an indulgent father of a very conventional type: he had rather the chuckling
pride of the city gentleman than the educational gravity of the intellectual.
Browning was now famous, Bells and Pomegranates, Men and Women, Christmas Eve, and Dramatis Personæ had
successively glorified his Italian period. But he was already brooding half–unconsciously on more famous things. He has
himself left on record a description of the incident out of which grew the whole impulse and plan of his greatest
achievement. In a passage marked with all his peculiar sense of material things, all that power of writing of stone or metal
or the fabric of drapery, so that we seem to be handling and smelling them, he has described a stall for the selling of
odds and ends of every variety of utility and uselessness:—
"picture frames
White through the worn gilt, mirror–sconces chipped,
Bronze angel–heads once knobs attached to chests,
(Handled when ancient dames chose forth brocade)
Modern chalk drawings, studies from the nude,
Samples of stone, jet, breccia, porphyry
Polished and rough, sundry amazing busts
In baked earth, (broken, Providence be praised!)
A wreck of tapestry proudly–purposed web
When reds and blues were indeed red and blue,
Now offer’d as a mat to save bare feet
(Since carpets constitute a cruel cost).
*
Vulgarised Horace for the use of schools,
'The Life, Death, Miracles of Saint Somebody,
Saint Somebody Else, his Miracles, Death, and Life'—
With this, one glance at the lettered back of which,
And 'Stall,' cried I; a lira made it mine."
This sketch embodies indeed the very poetry of débris, and comes nearer than any other poem has done to expressing
the pathos and picturesqueness of a low–class pawnshop. "This," which Browning bought for a lira out of this heap of
rubbish, was, of course, the old Latin record of the criminal case of Guido Franceschini, tried for the murder of his wife
Pompilia in the year 1698. And this again, it is scarcely necessary to say, was the ground–plan and motive of The Ring
and the Book.
Browning had picked up the volume and partly planned the poem during his wife’s lifetime in Italy. But the more he
studied it, the more the dimensions of the theme appeared to widen and deepen; and he came at last, there can be little
doubt, to regard it definitely as his magnum opus to which he would devote many years to come. Then came the great
sorrow of his life, and he cast about him for something sufficiently immense and arduous and complicated to keep his
brain going like some huge and automatic engine. "I mean to keep writing," he said, "whether I like it or not." And thus
finally he took up the scheme of the Franceschini story, and developed it on a scale with a degree of elaboration,
repetition, and management, and inexhaustible scholarship which was never perhaps before given in the history of the
world to an affair of two or three characters. Of the larger literary and spiritual significance of the work, particularly in
reference to its curious and original form of narration, I shall speak subsequently. But there is one peculiarity about the
story which has more direct bearing on Browning’s life, and it appears singular that few, if any, of his critics have noticed
it. This peculiarity is the extraordinary resemblance between the moral problem involved in the poem if understood in its
essence, and the moral problem which constituted the crisis and centre of Browning’s own life. Nothing, properly
speaking, ever happened to Browning after his wife’s death; and his greatest work during that time was the telling, under
alien symbols and the veil of a wholly different story, the inner truth about his own greatest trial and hesitation. He
himself had in this sense the same difficulty as Caponsacchi, the supreme difficulty of having to trust himself to the reality
of virtue not only without the reward, but even without the name of virtue. He had, like Caponsacchi, preferred what was
unselfish and dubious to what was selfish and honourable. He knew better than any man that there is little danger of men
who really know anything of that naked and homeless responsibility seeking it too often or indulging it too much. The
conscientiousness of the law–abider is nothing in its terrors to the conscientiousness of the conscientious law–breaker.
Browning had once, for what he seriously believed to be a greater good, done what he himself would never have had the
cant to deny, ought to be called deceit and evasion. Such a thing ought never to come to a man twice. If he finds that
necessity twice, he may, I think, be looked at with the beginning of a suspicion. To Browning it came once, and he
devoted his greatest poem to a suggestion of how such a necessity may come to any man who is worthy to live.
As has already been suggested, any apparent danger that there may be in this excusing of an exceptional act is
counteracted by the perils of the act, since it must always be remembered that this kind of act has the immense
difference from all legal acts—that it can only be justified by success. If Browning had taken his wife to Paris, and she
had died in an hotel there, we can only conceive him saying, with the bitter emphasis of one of his own lines, "How
should I have borne me, please?" Before and after this event his life was as tranquil and casual a one as it would be
easy to imagine; but there always remained upon him something which was felt by all who knew him in after years—the
spirit of a man who had been ready when his time came, and had walked in his own devotion and certainty in a position
counted indefensible and almost along the brink of murder. This great moral of Browning, which may be called roughly
the doctrine of the great hour, enters, of course, into many poems besides The Ring and the Book, and is indeed the
mainspring of a great part of his poetry taken as a whole. It is, of course, the central idea of that fine poem, "The Statue
and the Bust," which has given a great deal of distress to a great many people because of its supposed invasion of
recognised morality. It deals, as every one knows, with a Duke Ferdinand and an elopement which he planned with the
bride of one of the Riccardi. The lovers begin by deferring their flight for various more or less comprehensible reasons of
convenience; but the habit of shrinking from the final step grows steadily upon them, and they never take it, but die, as it
were, waiting for each other. The objection that the act thus avoided was a criminal one is very simply and quite clearly
answered by Browning himself. His case against the dilatory couple is not in the least affected by the viciousness of their
aim. His case is that they exhibited no virtue. Crime was frustrated in them by cowardice, which is probably the worse
immorality of the two. The same idea again may be found in that delightful lyric "Youth and Art," where a successful
cantatrice reproaches a successful sculptor with their failure to understand each other in their youth and poverty.
"Each life unfulfilled, you see;
It hangs still, patchy and scrappy:
We have not sighed deep, laughed free,
Starved, feasted, despaired,—been happy."
And this conception of the great hour, which breaks out everywhere in Browning, it is almost impossible not to connect
with his own internal drama. It is really curious that this correspondence has not been insisted on. Probably critics have
been misled by the fact that Browning in many places appears to boast that he is purely dramatic, that he has never put
himself into his work, a thing which no poet, good or bad, who ever lived could possibly avoid doing.
The enormous scope and seriousness of The Ring and the Book occupied Browning for some five or six years, and the
great epic appeared in the winter of 1868. Just before it was published Smith and Elder brought out a uniform edition of
all Browning’s works up to that time, and the two incidents taken together may be considered to mark the final and
somewhat belated culmination of Browning’s literary fame. The years since his wife’s death, that had been covered by
the writing of The Ring and the Book, had been years of an almost feverish activity in that and many other ways. His
travels had been restless and continued, his industry immense, and for the first time he began that mode of life which
afterwards became so characteristic of him—the life of what is called society. A man of a shallower and more sentimental
type would have professed to find the life of dinner–tables and soirées vain and unsatisfying to a poet, and especially to
a poet in mourning. But if there is one thing more than another which is stirring and honourable about Browning, it is the
entire absence in him of this cant of dissatisfaction. He had the one great requirement of a poet—he was not difficult to
please. The life of society was superficial, but it is only very superficial people who object to the superficial. To the man
who sees the marvellousness of all things, the surface of life is fully as strange and magical as its interior; clearness and
plainness of life is fully as mysterious as its mysteries. The young man in evening dress, pulling on his gloves, is quite as
elemental a figure as any anchorite, quite as incomprehensible, and indeed quite as alarming.
A great many literary persons have expressed astonishment at, or even disapproval of, this social frivolity of
Browning’s. Not one of these literary people would have been shocked if Browning’s interest in humanity had led him into
a gambling hell in the Wild West or a low tavern in Paris; but it seems to be tacitly assumed that fashionable people are
not human at all. Humanitarians of a material and dogmatic type, the philanthropists and the professional reformers go to
look for humanity in remote places and in huge statistics. Humanitarians of a more vivid type, the Bohemian artists, go to
look for humanity in thieves' kitchens and the studios of the Quartier Latin. But humanitarians of the highest type, the
great poets and philosophers, do not go to look for humanity at all. For them alone among all men the nearest drawing–
room is full of humanity, and even their own families are human. Shakespeare ended his life by buying a house in his
own native town and talking to the townsmen. Browning was invited to a great many conversaziones and private views,
and did not pretend that they bored him. In a letter belonging to this period of his life he describes his first dinner at one
of the Oxford colleges with an unaffected delight and vanity, which reminds the reader of nothing so much as the pride of
the boy–captain of a public school if he were invited to a similar function and received a few compliments. It may be
indeed that Browning had a kind of second youth in this long–delayed social recognition, but at least he enjoyed his
second youth nearly as much as his first, and it is not every one who can do that.
Of Browning’s actual personality and presence in this later middle age of his, memories are still sufficiently clear. He
was a middle–sized, well set up, erect man, with somewhat emphatic gestures, and, as almost all testimonies mention, a
curiously strident voice. The beard, the removal of which his wife had resented with so quaint an indignation, had grown
again, but grown quite white, which, as she said when it occurred, was a signal mark of the justice of the gods. His hair
was still fairly dark, and his whole appearance at this time must have been very well represented by Mr. G.F. Watts’s fine
portrait in the National Portrait Gallery. The portrait bears one of the many testimonies which exist to Mr. Watts’s grasp of
the essential of character, for it is the only one of the portraits of Browning in which we get primarily the air of virility,
even of animal virility, tempered but not disguised, with a certain touch of the pallor of the brain–worker. He looks here
what he was—a very healthy man, too scholarly to live a completely healthy life.
His manner in society, as has been more than once indicated, was that of a man anxious, if anything, to avoid the air of
intellectual eminence. Lockhart said briefly, "I like Browning; he isn’t at all like a damned literary man." He was, according
to some, upon occasion, talkative and noisy to a fault; but there are two kinds of men who monopolise conversation. The
first kind are those who like the sound of their own voice; the second are those who do not know what the sound of their
own voice is like. Browning was one of the latter class. His volubility in speech had the same origin as his
voluminousness and obscurity in literature—a kind of headlong humility. He cannot assuredly have been aware that he
talked people down or have wished to do so. For this would have been precisely a violation of the ideal of the man of the
world, the one ambition and even weakness that he had. He wished to be a man of the world, and he never in the full
sense was one. He remained a little too much of a boy, a little too much even of a Puritan, and a little too much of what
may be called a man of the universe, to be a man of the world.
One of his faults probably was the thing roughly called prejudice. On the question, for example, of table–turning and
psychic phenomena he was in a certain degree fierce and irrational. He was not indeed, as we shall see when we come
to study "Sludge the Medium," exactly prejudiced against spiritualism. But he was beyond all question stubbornly
prejudiced against spiritualists. Whether the medium Home was or was not a scoundrel it is somewhat difficult in our day
to conjecture. But in so far as he claimed supernatural powers, he may have been as honest a gentleman as ever lived.
And even if we think that the moral atmosphere of Home is that of a man of dubious character, we can still feel that
Browning might have achieved his purpose without making it so obvious that he thought so. Some traces again, though
much fainter ones, may be found of something like a subconscious hostility to the Roman Church, or at least a less full
comprehension of the grandeur of the Latin religious civilisation than might have been expected of a man of Browning’s
great imaginative tolerance. Æstheticism, Bohemianism, the irresponsibilities of the artist, the untidy morals of Grub
Street and the Latin Quarter, he hated with a consuming hatred. He was himself exact in everything, from his scholarship
to his clothes; and even when he wore the loose white garments of the lounger in Southern Europe, they were in their
own way as precise as a dress suit. This extra carefulness in all things he defended against the cant of Bohemianism as
the right attitude for the poet. When some one excused coarseness or negligence on the ground of genius, he said,
"That is an error: Noblesse oblige."
Browning’s prejudices, however, belonged altogether to that healthy order which is characterised by a cheerful and
satisfied ignorance. It never does a man any very great harm to hate a thing that he knows nothing about. It is the hating
of a thing when we do know something about it which corrodes the character. We all have a dark feeling of resistance
towards people we have never met, and a profound and manly dislike of the authors we have never read. It does not
harm a man to be certain before opening the books that Whitman is an obscene ranter or that Stevenson is a mere trifler
with style. It is the man who can think these things after he has read the books who must be in a fair way to mental
perdition. Prejudice, in fact, is not so much the great intellectual sin as a thing which we may call, to coin a word,
"postjudice," not the bias before the fair trial, but the bias that remains afterwards. With Browning’s swift and emphatic
nature the bias was almost always formed before he had gone into the matter. But almost all the men he really knew he
admired, almost all the books he had really read he enjoyed. He stands pre–eminent among those great universalists
who praised the ground they trod on and commended existence like any other material, in its samples. He had no kinship
with those new and strange universalists of the type of Tolstoi who praise existence to the exclusion of all the institutions
they have lived under, and all the ties they have known. He thought the world good because he had found so many
things that were good in it—religion, the nation, the family, the social class. He did not, like the new humanitarian, think
the world good because he had found so many things in it that were bad.
As has been previously suggested, there was something very queer and dangerous that underlay all the good humour
of Browning. If one of these idle prejudices were broken by better knowledge, he was all the better pleased. But if some
of the prejudices that were really rooted in him were trodden on, even by accident, such as his aversion to loose artistic
cliques, or his aversion to undignified publicity, his rage was something wholly transfiguring and alarming, something far
removed from the shrill disapproval of Carlyle and Ruskin. It can only be said that he became a savage, and not always a
very agreeable or presentable savage. The indecent fury which danced upon the bones of Edward Fitzgerald was a
thing which ought not to have astonished any one who had known much of Browning’s character or even of his work.
Some unfortunate persons on another occasion had obtained some of Mrs. Browning’s letters shortly after her death,
and proposed to write a Life founded upon them. They ought to have understood that Browning would probably
disapprove; but if he talked to them about it, as he did to others, and it is exceedingly probable that he did, they must
have thought he was mad. "What I suffer with the paws of these black–guards in my bowels you can fancy," he says.
Again he writes: "Think of this beast working away, not deeming my feelings, or those of her family, worthy of notice. It
shall not be done if I can stop the scamp’s knavery along with his breath." Whether Browning actually resorted to this
extreme course is unknown; nothing is known except that he wrote a letter to the ambitious biographer which reduced
him to silence, probably from stupefaction.
The same peculiarity ought, as I have said, to have been apparent to any one who knew anything of Browning’s literary
work. A great number of his poems are marked by a trait of which by its nature it is more or less impossible to give
examples. Suffice it to say that it is truly extraordinary that poets like Swinburne (who seldom uses a gross word) should
have been spoken of as if they had introduced moral license into Victorian poetry. What the Non–conformist conscience
has been doing to have passed Browning is something difficult to imagine. But the peculiarity of this occasional
coarseness in his work is this—that it is always used to express a certain wholesome fury and contempt for things sickly,
or ungenerous, or unmanly. The poet seems to feel that there are some things so contemptible that you can only speak
of them in pothouse words. It would be idle, and perhaps undesirable, to give examples; but it may be noted that the
same brutal physical metaphor is used by his Caponsacchi about the people who could imagine Pompilia impure and by
his Shakespeare in "At the Mermaid," about the claim of the Byronic poet to enter into the heart of humanity. In both
cases Browning feels, and perhaps in a manner rightly, that the best thing we can do with a sentiment essentially base is
to strip off its affectations and state it basely, and that the mud of Chaucer is a great deal better than the poison of
Sterne. Herein again Browning is close to the average man; and to do the average man justice, there is a great deal
more of this Browningesque hatred of Byronism in the brutality of his conversation than many people suppose.
Such, roughly and as far as we can discover, was the man who, in the full summer and even the full autumn of his
intellectual powers, began to grow upon the consciousness of the English literary world about this time. For the first time
friendship grew between him and the other great men of his time. Tennyson, for whom he then and always felt the best
and most personal kind of admiration, came into his life, and along with him Gladstone and Francis Palgrave. There
began to crowd in upon him those honours whereby a man is to some extent made a classic in his lifetime, so that he is
honoured even if he is unread. He was made a Fellow of Balliol in 1867, and the homage of the great universities
continued thenceforth unceasingly until his death, despite many refusals on his part. He was unanimously elected Lord
Rector of Glasgow University in 1875. He declined, owing to his deep and somewhat characteristic aversion to formal
public speaking, and in 1877 he had to decline on similar grounds the similar offer from the University of St. Andrews. He
was much at the English universities, was a friend of Dr. Jowett, and enjoyed the university life at the age of sixty–three
in a way that he probably would not have enjoyed it if he had ever been to a university. The great universities would not
let him alone, to their great credit, and he became a D.C.L. of Cambridge in 1879, and a D.C.L. of Oxford in 1882. When
he received these honours there were, of course, the traditional buffooneries of the undergraduates, and one of them
dropped a red cotton night–cap neatly on his head as he passed under the gallery. Some indignant intellectuals wrote to
him to protest against this affront, but Browning took the matter in the best and most characteristic way. "You are far too
hard," he wrote in answer, "on the very harmless drolleries of the young men. Indeed, there used to be a regularly
appointed jester, 'Filius Terrae' he was called, whose business it was to gibe and jeer at the honoured ones by way of
reminder that all human glories are merely gilded baubles and must not be fancied metal." In this there are other and
deeper things characteristic of Browning besides his learning and humour. In discussing anything, he must always fall
back upon great speculative and eternal ideas. Even in the tomfoolery of a horde of undergraduates he can only see a
symbol of the ancient office of ridicule in the scheme of morals. The young men themselves were probably unaware that
they were the representatives of the "Filius Terrae."
But the years during which Browning was thus reaping some of his late laurels began to be filled with incidents that
reminded him how the years were passing over him. On June 20, 1866, his father had died, a man of whom it is
impossible to think without a certain emotion, a man who had lived quietly and persistently for others, to whom Browning
owed more than it is easy to guess, to whom we in all probability mainly owe Browning. In 1868 one of his closest
friends, Arabella Barrett, the sister of his wife, died, as her sister had done, alone with Browning. Browning was not a
superstitious man; he somewhat stormily prided himself on the contrary; but he notes at this time "a dream which Arabella
had of Her, in which she prophesied their meeting in five years," that is, of course, the meeting of Elizabeth and Arabella.
His friend Milsand, to whom Sordello was dedicated, died in 1886. "I never knew," said Browning, "or ever shall know,
his like among men." But though both fame and a growing isolation indicated that he was passing towards the evening of
his days, though he bore traces of the progress, in a milder attitude towards things, and a greater preference for long
exiles with those he loved, one thing continued in him with unconquerable energy—there was no diminution in the
quantity, no abatement in the immense designs of his intellectual output.
In 1871 he produced Balaustion’s Adventure, a work exhibiting not only his genius in its highest condition of power, but
something more exacting even than genius to a man of his mature and changed life, immense investigation, prodigious
memory, the thorough assimilation of the vast literature of a remote civilisation. Balaustion’s Adventure, which is, of
course, the mere framework for an English version of the Alcestis of Euripides, is an illustration of one of Browning’s
finest traits, his immeasurable capacity for a classic admiration. Those who knew him tell us that in conversation he
never revealed himself so impetuously or so brilliantly as when declaiming the poetry of others; and Balaustion’s
Adventure is a monument of this fiery self–forgetfulness. It is penetrated with the passionate desire to render Euripides
worthily, and to that imitation are for the time being devoted all the gigantic powers which went to make the songs of
Pippa and the last agony of Guido. Browning never put himself into anything more powerfully or more successfully; yet it