Life and Letters of Robert Browning [100]
I feel such comfort and delight
in doing the best I can with my own object of life, poetry --
which, I think, I never could have seen the good of before,
that it shows me I have taken the root I DID take, WELL.
I hope to do much more yet -- and that the flower of it
will be put into Her hand somehow. I really have great opportunities
and advantages -- on the whole, almost unprecedented ones -- I think,
no other disturbances and cares than those I am most grateful
for being allowed to have. . . .'
==
One of our very few written reminiscences of Mr. Browning's social life
refers to this year, 1864, and to the evening, February 12,
on which he signed his will in the presence of Mr. Francis Palgrave
and Alfred Tennyson. It is inscribed in the diary of Mr. Thomas Richmond,
then chaplain to St. George's Hospital; and Mr. Reginald Palgrave
has kindly procured me a copy of it. A brilliant party had met at dinner
at the house of Mr. F. Palgrave, York Gate, Regent's Park;
Mr. Richmond, having fulfilled a prior engagement, had joined it later.
`There were, in order,' he says, `round the dinner-table (dinner being over),
Gifford Palgrave, Tennyson, Dr. John Ogle, Sir Francis H. Doyle,
Frank Palgrave, W. E. Gladstone, Browning, Sir John Simeon,
Monsignor Patterson, Woolner, and Reginald Palgrave.'
Mr. Richmond closes his entry by saying he will never forget that evening.
The names of those whom it had brought together, almost all to be
sooner or later numbered among the Poet's friends, were indeed enough
to stamp it as worthy of recollection. One or two characteristic
utterances of Mr. Browning are, however, the only ones
which it seems advisable to repeat here. The conversation having turned
on the celebration of the Shakespeare ter-centenary, he said:
`Here we are called upon to acknowledge Shakespeare, we who have him
in our very bones and blood, our very selves. The very recognition
of Shakespeare's merits by the Committee reminds me of nothing
so apt as an illustration, as the decree of the Directoire
that men might acknowledge God.'
Among the subjects discussed was the advisability of making schoolboys write
English verses as well as Latin and Greek. `Woolner and Sir Francis Doyle
were for this; Gladstone and Browning against it.'
Work had now found its fitting place in the Poet's life.
It was no longer the overflow of an irresistible productive energy;
it was the deliberate direction of that energy towards an appointed end.
We hear something of his own feeling concerning this
in a letter of August '65, again from Ste.-Marie, and called forth
by some gossip concerning him which Miss Blagden had connected
with his then growing fame.
==
`. . . I suppose that what you call "my fame within these four years"
comes from a little of this gossiping and going about,
and showing myself to be alive: and so indeed some folks say --
but I hardly think it: for remember I was uninterruptedly (almost) in London
from the time I published `Paracelsus' till I ended that string of plays
with `Luria' -- and I used to go out then, and see far more
of merely literary people, critics &c. than I do now, -- but what came of it?
There were always a few people who had a certain opinion of my poems,
but nobody cared to speak what he thought, or the things printed
twenty-five years ago would not have waited so long for a good word;
but at last a new set of men arrive who don't mind the conventionalities
of ignoring one and seeing everything in another -- Chapman says,
"the new orders come from Oxford and Cambridge," and all my new cultivators
are young men -- more than that, I observe that some of my old friends
don't like at all the irruption of outsiders who rescue me from
their sober and private approval, and take those words out of their mouths
"which they always meant to say" and never did. When there gets to be
a general feeling of this kind, that there must be something
in the works of an author, the reviews are obliged to notice him,
such notice as it is -- but what
in doing the best I can with my own object of life, poetry --
which, I think, I never could have seen the good of before,
that it shows me I have taken the root I DID take, WELL.
I hope to do much more yet -- and that the flower of it
will be put into Her hand somehow. I really have great opportunities
and advantages -- on the whole, almost unprecedented ones -- I think,
no other disturbances and cares than those I am most grateful
for being allowed to have. . . .'
==
One of our very few written reminiscences of Mr. Browning's social life
refers to this year, 1864, and to the evening, February 12,
on which he signed his will in the presence of Mr. Francis Palgrave
and Alfred Tennyson. It is inscribed in the diary of Mr. Thomas Richmond,
then chaplain to St. George's Hospital; and Mr. Reginald Palgrave
has kindly procured me a copy of it. A brilliant party had met at dinner
at the house of Mr. F. Palgrave, York Gate, Regent's Park;
Mr. Richmond, having fulfilled a prior engagement, had joined it later.
`There were, in order,' he says, `round the dinner-table (dinner being over),
Gifford Palgrave, Tennyson, Dr. John Ogle, Sir Francis H. Doyle,
Frank Palgrave, W. E. Gladstone, Browning, Sir John Simeon,
Monsignor Patterson, Woolner, and Reginald Palgrave.'
Mr. Richmond closes his entry by saying he will never forget that evening.
The names of those whom it had brought together, almost all to be
sooner or later numbered among the Poet's friends, were indeed enough
to stamp it as worthy of recollection. One or two characteristic
utterances of Mr. Browning are, however, the only ones
which it seems advisable to repeat here. The conversation having turned
on the celebration of the Shakespeare ter-centenary, he said:
`Here we are called upon to acknowledge Shakespeare, we who have him
in our very bones and blood, our very selves. The very recognition
of Shakespeare's merits by the Committee reminds me of nothing
so apt as an illustration, as the decree of the Directoire
that men might acknowledge God.'
Among the subjects discussed was the advisability of making schoolboys write
English verses as well as Latin and Greek. `Woolner and Sir Francis Doyle
were for this; Gladstone and Browning against it.'
Work had now found its fitting place in the Poet's life.
It was no longer the overflow of an irresistible productive energy;
it was the deliberate direction of that energy towards an appointed end.
We hear something of his own feeling concerning this
in a letter of August '65, again from Ste.-Marie, and called forth
by some gossip concerning him which Miss Blagden had connected
with his then growing fame.
==
`. . . I suppose that what you call "my fame within these four years"
comes from a little of this gossiping and going about,
and showing myself to be alive: and so indeed some folks say --
but I hardly think it: for remember I was uninterruptedly (almost) in London
from the time I published `Paracelsus' till I ended that string of plays
with `Luria' -- and I used to go out then, and see far more
of merely literary people, critics &c. than I do now, -- but what came of it?
There were always a few people who had a certain opinion of my poems,
but nobody cared to speak what he thought, or the things printed
twenty-five years ago would not have waited so long for a good word;
but at last a new set of men arrive who don't mind the conventionalities
of ignoring one and seeing everything in another -- Chapman says,
"the new orders come from Oxford and Cambridge," and all my new cultivators
are young men -- more than that, I observe that some of my old friends
don't like at all the irruption of outsiders who rescue me from
their sober and private approval, and take those words out of their mouths
"which they always meant to say" and never did. When there gets to be
a general feeling of this kind, that there must be something
in the works of an author, the reviews are obliged to notice him,
such notice as it is -- but what