Life and Letters of Robert Browning [6]
and more lucrative
than such appointments have since become. Its emoluments could be increased
by many honourable means not covered by the regular salary.
The working-day was short, and every additional hour's service well paid.
To be enrolled on the night-watch was also very remunerative;
there were enormous perquisites in pens, paper, and sealing-wax.*
Mr. Browning availed himself of these opportunities of adding to his income,
and was thus enabled, with the help of his private means, to gratify
his scholarly and artistic tastes, and give his children the benefit
of a very liberal education -- the one distinct ideal of success in life
which such a nature as his could form. Constituted as he was,
he probably suffered very little through the paternal unkindness
which had forced him into an uncongenial career. Its only palpable result
was to make him a more anxiously indulgent parent when his own time came.
--
* I have been told that, far from becoming careless in the use of these things
from his practically unbounded command of them, he developed for them
an almost superstitious reverence. He could never endure
to see a scrap of writing-paper wasted.
--
Many circumstances conspired to secure to the coming poet
a happier childhood and youth than his father had had. His path was to be
smoothed not only by natural affection and conscientious care,
but by literary and artistic sympathy. The second Mr. Browning differed,
in certain respects, as much from the third as from the first.
There were, nevertheless, strong points in which, if he did not resemble,
he at least distinctly foreshadowed him; and the genius of the one
would lack some possible explanation if we did not recognize in great measure
its organized material in the other. Much, indeed, that was genius in the son
existed as talent in the father. The moral nature of the younger man
diverged from that of the older, though retaining strong points of similarity;
but the mental equipments of the two differed far less in themselves than in
the different uses to which temperament and circumstances trained them.
The most salient intellectual characteristic of Mr. Browning senior
was his passion for reading. In his daughter's words,
`he read in season, and out of season;' and he not only read, but remembered.
As a schoolboy, he knew by heart the first book of the `Iliad',
and all the odes of Horace; and it shows how deeply
the classical part of his training must have entered into him,
that he was wont, in later life, to soothe his little boy to sleep
by humming to him an ode of Anacreon. It was one of his amusements at school
to organize Homeric combats among the boys, in which the fighting
was carried on in the manner of the Greeks and Trojans,
and he and his friend Kenyon would arm themselves with swords and shields,
and hack at each other lustily, exciting themselves to battle
by insulting speeches derived from the Homeric text.*
--
* This anecdote is partly quoted from Mrs. Andrew Crosse,
who has introduced it into her article `John Kenyon and his Friends',
`Temple Bar', April 1890. She herself received it from Mr. Dykes Campbell.
--
Mr. Browning had also an extraordinary power of versifying,
and taught his son from babyhood the words he wished him to remember,
by joining them to a grotesque rhyme; the child learned
all his Latin declensions in this way. His love of art had been proved
by his desire to adopt it as a profession; his talent for it
was evidenced by the life and power of the sketches, often caricatures,
which fell from his pen or pencil as easily as written words.
Mr. Barrett Browning remembers gaining a very early
elementary knowledge of anatomy from comic illustrated rhymes
(now in the possession of their old friend, Mrs. Fraser Corkran)
through which his grandfather impressed upon him the names and position
of the principal bones of the human body.
Even more remarkable than his delight in reading was the manner in which
Mr. Browning read. He carried into it
than such appointments have since become. Its emoluments could be increased
by many honourable means not covered by the regular salary.
The working-day was short, and every additional hour's service well paid.
To be enrolled on the night-watch was also very remunerative;
there were enormous perquisites in pens, paper, and sealing-wax.*
Mr. Browning availed himself of these opportunities of adding to his income,
and was thus enabled, with the help of his private means, to gratify
his scholarly and artistic tastes, and give his children the benefit
of a very liberal education -- the one distinct ideal of success in life
which such a nature as his could form. Constituted as he was,
he probably suffered very little through the paternal unkindness
which had forced him into an uncongenial career. Its only palpable result
was to make him a more anxiously indulgent parent when his own time came.
--
* I have been told that, far from becoming careless in the use of these things
from his practically unbounded command of them, he developed for them
an almost superstitious reverence. He could never endure
to see a scrap of writing-paper wasted.
--
Many circumstances conspired to secure to the coming poet
a happier childhood and youth than his father had had. His path was to be
smoothed not only by natural affection and conscientious care,
but by literary and artistic sympathy. The second Mr. Browning differed,
in certain respects, as much from the third as from the first.
There were, nevertheless, strong points in which, if he did not resemble,
he at least distinctly foreshadowed him; and the genius of the one
would lack some possible explanation if we did not recognize in great measure
its organized material in the other. Much, indeed, that was genius in the son
existed as talent in the father. The moral nature of the younger man
diverged from that of the older, though retaining strong points of similarity;
but the mental equipments of the two differed far less in themselves than in
the different uses to which temperament and circumstances trained them.
The most salient intellectual characteristic of Mr. Browning senior
was his passion for reading. In his daughter's words,
`he read in season, and out of season;' and he not only read, but remembered.
As a schoolboy, he knew by heart the first book of the `Iliad',
and all the odes of Horace; and it shows how deeply
the classical part of his training must have entered into him,
that he was wont, in later life, to soothe his little boy to sleep
by humming to him an ode of Anacreon. It was one of his amusements at school
to organize Homeric combats among the boys, in which the fighting
was carried on in the manner of the Greeks and Trojans,
and he and his friend Kenyon would arm themselves with swords and shields,
and hack at each other lustily, exciting themselves to battle
by insulting speeches derived from the Homeric text.*
--
* This anecdote is partly quoted from Mrs. Andrew Crosse,
who has introduced it into her article `John Kenyon and his Friends',
`Temple Bar', April 1890. She herself received it from Mr. Dykes Campbell.
--
Mr. Browning had also an extraordinary power of versifying,
and taught his son from babyhood the words he wished him to remember,
by joining them to a grotesque rhyme; the child learned
all his Latin declensions in this way. His love of art had been proved
by his desire to adopt it as a profession; his talent for it
was evidenced by the life and power of the sketches, often caricatures,
which fell from his pen or pencil as easily as written words.
Mr. Barrett Browning remembers gaining a very early
elementary knowledge of anatomy from comic illustrated rhymes
(now in the possession of their old friend, Mrs. Fraser Corkran)
through which his grandfather impressed upon him the names and position
of the principal bones of the human body.
Even more remarkable than his delight in reading was the manner in which
Mr. Browning read. He carried into it