Part 1 (1/2)
Life of Robert Browning
by William Sharp
NOTE
In all important respects I leave this volume to speak for itself For obvious reasons it does not pretend to be s, the definitive biography cannot appear for ratefully may I take the present opportunity to express , and to other relatives and intiiven me serviceable information, and otherwise rendered kindly aid For some of the hitherto unpublished details my thanks are, in particular, due to Mrs Fraser Corkran and Miss Alice Corkran, and to other old friends of the poet and his fah in one or two instances, Ihie my indebtedness to Dr Furnivall, for the loan of the advance-proofs of his privately-printed pa 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 Ingra_; and to the _Memoirs of Anna Jameson_, the _Italian Note-Books_ of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mr
GS 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 enerously placed atfroht which they undoubtedly cast upon the personality and genius of the poet
LIFE OF BROWNING
CHAPTER I
It ularly appropriate that so cosh sohty corandiose and evenfrom the first What fitter birthplace for the poet whom a co,” the poet whose writings are indeed a s a Londoner and yet be a provincial The accident of birthplace does not necessarily involve parochialise which produces the Hae It is a favourite jest of Rusticus that his urban brother has the e of a parish beadle Nevertheless, though the strongest blood insurgent in the ht well be proud to have had one's atoe rhythested, but ever ebullient centre Certainly Browning was not thea Londoner, h good sense, no doubt, but possibly also through soreat city was indeed the fit reatest city of the world!” he exclai to say! It suggests a wavelet in aitself because it had its birth out in the great ocean”
On the day of the poet's funeral in Westminster Abbey, one of theca into his own This is profoundly true There was in good sooth a o, we should have surrendered as to a conqueror: noever, we know that princes of the h they must be valorous and potent as of yore, can enter upon no heritance save that which naturally awaits the and intricate processes
The lustru, that is the third in the nineteenth century, was a remarkable one indeed Thackeray careat poet, Charles dickens within the same twelvemonth, and Tennyson three years sooner, when also Elizabeth Barrett was born, and the foreht It is a ht which ultimately bore forward on its crest so many famous un to rise with irresistible ireat Flemish novelist, Henri Conscience, in 1812: about the sarath, Gutzkow, and Auerbach, respectively one of the most lyrical poets, theromancer of Germany: and, also, in France, of Theophile Gautier and Alfred de Musset A representatives of the other arts--with two of which Browning must ever be closely associated--Mendelssohn and Chopin were born in 1809, and Schu years: within which space also cah 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 Duo, Ampere, Quinet, Prosper Meri 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; Jereht of his contelibly of the virtues of hu the opposite qualities, while Crabbe was looked upon as one of the fore 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 twenty; Lael, Niebuhr (to specify so names only), had many years of work before theer was thirty-two The Polish poet Mickieas a boy of fourteen, and Poushkin was but a twelvemonth older; Heine, a lad of twelve, was already enaend The fore about the sands of Boulogne, or perhaps wandering often along the ramparts of the old town, introspective even then, with so 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, undreaantic 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 reat names, of men ere born coincidentally with, or were in the broader sense conte as a fortuitous birth Creation does not occur spontaneously, as in that drawing of David Scott's where fro hureat French writer has indicated, a man is the child of his time It is a reat , but rather at the ac wave, but the glea crown of that wave itself The epoch expends itself in preparation for these great ones
If Nature's first laere not a law of excess, the econoenev who speaks solooe 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 the great days had passed away even before Robert Browning and Alfred Tennyson were born The as prepared for Browning, as it was for Shakspere: as it is, beyond doubt, for the next high peer of these
There were 'Roberts' aenerations It has been affirlish equivalent for Bruning, and that the fain is too re himself, it inal name was De Bruni It is not a reat extent in his genius, Anglo-Saxon Though there are plausible grounds for the assu to substantiate the common assertion that, immediately, or remotely, his people were Jews[1]
[Footnote 1: 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 physiognoranted: 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 inativeness 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 ad of a Puritan stock He was tolerant of all religious forelicalis of the Sehtly in the portraits of hi the last twenty years, and scarcely at all in those which represent hi by Rudolf Lehe of forty-seven, where he looks out upon us with a physiognolish 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, ner of the Woodyates Inn, in the parish of Pentridge, in Dorsetshi+re, clai 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 booh Foyle, and perished in the act The sa who commanded the shi+p _The Holy Ghost_, which conveyed Henry V to France before he fought the Battle of Agincourt, and in recognition of whose services taves, 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 arallant Captain Micaiah, and are borne by the present falishman in the strictest sense, however, as has commonly been asserted, is not the case His h her mother and by birth, but her father was the son of a Ger, named Wiedemann, who, by the way, in connection with his relationshi+p asto note, was an accorandree throws a valuable light on the vigour and variety of the poet's genius Possibly the lish as Gerraph fros? I had it long ago froinally frorated to the North of Ireland during the times of the Covenanters There is, e in the North of Ireland called Browningstown Might not the poet be related to these Scottish Brownings?”