Robert Browning: How to Know Him | Page 3

utterly unfitted for
the active duties and struggles of life, and indeed for the amenities of
social intercourse. With ninety-nine out of a hundred, such an
education, so far as it made for either happiness or efficiency, would be
a failure. But Browning was the hundredth man. He was profoundly
learned without pedantry and without conceit; and he was primarily a
social being,
His physical training was not neglected. The boy had expert private
instruction in fencing, boxing, and riding. He was at ease on the back of
a spirited horse. He was particularly fond of dancing, which later
aroused the wonder of Elizabeth Barrett, who found it difficult to
imagine the author of _Paracelsus_ dancing the polka.
In 1833 appeared Browning's first poem, _Pauline_, which had been
completed before he was twenty-one years old. His aunt, Mrs.
Silverthorne, gave him one hundred and fifty dollars, which paid the
expenses of publication. Not a single copy was sold, and the unbound
sheets came home to roost. The commercial worth of _Pauline_ was
exactly zero; today it is said that only five copies exist. One was sold
recently for two thousand four hundred dollars.
In 1834 Browning visited Russia, going by steamer to Rotterdam, and
then driving fifteen hundred miles with horses. Although he was in
Russia about three months, and at the most sensitive time of life, the
country made surprisingly little impression upon him, or at least upon
his poetry. The dramatic idyl, _Ivan Ivànovitch_, is practically the only
literary result of this journey. It was the south, and not the north, that
was to be the inspiration of Browning.
He published his second poem, _Paracelsus_, in 1835. Although this
attracted no general attention, and had no sale, it was
enthusiastically
reviewed by John Forster, who declared that its author was a man of

genius. The most fortunate result of its appearance was that it brought
Browning within the pale of literary society, and gave him the
friendship of some of the leading men in London. The great actor
Macready was charmed with the poem, and young Browning haunted
Macready's dressing-room at the theatre for years; but their friendship
ceased in 1843 when _A Blot in the 'Scutcheon_ was acted. Browning
wrote four plays for Macready, two of which were accepted.
Although Browning late in life remarked in a casual conversation that
he had visited Italy in 1834, he must have been mistaken, for it is
impossible to find any record of such a journey. To the best of our
knowledge, he first saw the land of his inspiration in 1838, sailing from
London on April 13th, passing through the Straits of Gibraltar on the
twenty-ninth, and reaching Trieste on May 30th. On the first of June he
entered Venice. It was on a walking-trip that he first saw the village of
Asolo, about thirty miles to the northeast of Venice. Little did he then
realise how closely his name would be forever associated with this tiny
town. The scenes of _Pippa Passes_ he located there: the last summer
of his life, in 1889, was spent in Asolo, his last volume he named in
memory of the village; and on the one hundredth anniversary of his
birth, the street where he lived and wrote in 1889 was formally named
Via Roberto Browning. His son, Robert Barrett Browning, lived to see
this event, and died at Asolo on July 8, 1912.
The long and obscure poem _Sordello_ was published in 1840; and
then for thirty years Browning produced poetry of the highest order:
poetry that shows scarcely any obscurity, and that in lyric and dramatic
power has given its author a fixed place among the greatest names in
English literature.
The story of the marriage and married life of Elizabeth Barrett and
Robert Browning is one of the greatest love stories in the world's
history; their love-letters reveal a drama of noble passion that excels in
beauty and intensity the universally popular examples of Heloise and
Abelard, Aucassin and Nicolette, Paul and Virginia. There was a
mysterious bond between them long before the personal acquaintance:
each admired the other's poetry. Miss Barrett had a picture of Browning

in her sickroom, and declared that the adverse criticism constantly
directed against his verse hurt her like a lash across her own back. In a
new volume of poems, she made a
complimentary reference to his
work, and in January, 1845, he wrote her a letter properly beginning
with the two words, "I love." It was her verses that he loved, and said
so. In May he saw her and illustrated his own doctrine by falling in
love with her at first sight. She was in her fortieth year, and an invalid;
but if any one is surprised at the passion she aroused in the handsome
young