Life and Letters of Robert Browning [10]
This would perhaps be a mistake. It is difficult to reconcile any idea
of bloodlessness with the bounding vitality of his younger body and mind.
Any symptom of organic disease could scarcely, in his case,
have been overlooked. But so much is certain: he was conscious
of what he called a nervousness of nature which neither father nor grandfather
could have bequeathed to him. He imputed to this, or, in other words,
to an undue physical sensitiveness to mental causes of irritation,
his proneness to deranged liver, and the asthmatic conditions
which he believed, rightly or wrongly, to be produced by it.
He was perhaps mistaken in some of his inferences, but he was not mistaken
in the fact. He had the pleasures as well as the pains
of this nervous temperament; its quick response to every congenial stimulus
of physical atmosphere, and human contact. It heightened the enjoyment,
perhaps exaggerated the consciousness of his physical powers.
It also certainly in his later years led him to overdraw them.
Many persons have believed that he could not live without society;
a prolonged seclusion from it would, for obvious reasons,
have been unsuited to him. But the excited gaiety which to the last
he carried into every social gathering was often primarily
the result of a moral and physical effort which his temperament prompted,
but his strength could not always justify. Nature avenged herself
in recurrent periods of exhaustion, long before the closing stage had set in.
I shall subsequently have occasion to trace this nervous impressibility
through various aspects and relations of his life; all I now seek to show
is that this healthiest of poets and most real of men was not compounded
of elements of pure health, and perhaps never could have been so.
It might sound grotesque to say that only a delicate woman
could have been the mother of Robert Browning. The fact remains
that of such a one, and no other, he was born; and we may imagine,
without being fanciful, that his father's placid intellectual powers
required for their transmutation into poetic genius
just this infusion of a vital element not only charged
with other racial and individual qualities, but physically and morally
more nearly allied to pain. Perhaps, even for his happiness as a man,
we could not have wished it otherwise.
Chapter 3
1812-1826
Birth of Robert Browning -- His Childhood and Schooldays --
Restless Temperament -- Brilliant Mental Endowments --
Incidental Peculiarities -- Strong Religious Feeling --
Passionate Attachment to his Mother; Grief at first Separation --
Fondness for Animals -- Experiences of School Life -- Extensive Reading --
Early Attempts in Verse -- Letter from his Father concerning them --
Spurious Poems in Circulation -- `Incondita' -- Mr. Fox -- Miss Flower.
Robert Browning was born, as has been often repeated, at Camberwell,
on May 7, 1812, soon after a great comet had disappeared from the sky.
He was a handsome, vigorous, fearless child, and soon developed
an unresting activity and a fiery temper. He clamoured for occupation
from the moment he could speak. His mother could only keep him quiet
when once he had emerged from infancy by telling him stories
-- doubtless Bible stories -- while holding him on her knee.
His energies were of course destructive till they had found
their proper outlet; but we do not hear of his ever having destroyed anything
for the mere sake of doing so. His first recorded piece of mischief
was putting a handsome Brussels lace veil of his mother's into the fire;
but the motive, which he was just old enough to lisp out, was also his excuse:
`A pitty baze [pretty blaze], mamma.' Imagination soon came to his rescue.
It has often been told how he extemporized verse aloud while walking
round and round the dining-room table supporting himself by his hands,
when he was still so small that his head was scarcely above it.
He remembered having entertained his mother in the very first walk
he was considered old enough to take