Life of Robert Browning [12]
For a time Robert's education was superintended by a tutor,
who came to the house in Camberwell for several hours daily.
The afternoons were mainly devoted to music, to exercise,
and occasionally to various experimental studies in technical science.
In the evenings, after his preparatory tasks were over,
when he was not in the entertaining company of his father,
he read and assiduously wrote. After poetry, he cared most for history:
but as a matter of fact, little came amiss to his eager intellectual appetite.
It was a period of growth, with, it may be, a vague consciousness
that his mind was expanding towards compulsive expression.
"So as I grew, I rudely shaped my life
To my immediate wants, yet strong beneath
Was a vague sense of powers folded up --
A sense that though those shadowy times were past,
Their spirit dwelt in me, and I should rule."
When Mr. Browning was satisfied that the tutor had fulfilled his duty
he sent his son to attend a few lectures at University College,
in Gower Street, then just founded. Robert Browning's name
is on the registrar's books for the opening session, 1829-30.
"I attended with him the Greek class of Professor Long" (wrote a friend,
in the `Times', Dec. 14:'89), "and I well recollect the esteem and regard
in which he was held by his fellow-students. He was then a bright,
handsome youth, with long black hair falling over his shoulders."
So short was his period of attendance, however, and so unimportant
the instruction he there derived, that to all intents it may be said
Browning had no University training.
Notwithstanding the fact that Mr. Browning but slightly appreciated
his son's poetic idols and already found himself in an opposite literary camp,
he had a profound sympathy with the boy's ideals and no little confidence
in his powers. When the test came he acted wisely as well as with
affectionate complaisance. In a word, he practically left the decision
as to his course of life to Robert himself. The latter was helped thereto
by the knowledge that his sister would be provided for, and that, if need be,
there was sufficient for himself also. There was of course
but one way open to him. He would not have been a true poet, an artist,
if he had hesitated. With a strange misconception of the artistic spirit,
some one has awarded the poet great credit for his choice,
because he had "the singular courage to decline to be rich."
Browning himself had nothing of this bourgeois spirit:
he was the last man to speak of an inevitable artistic decision
as "singular courage". There are no doubt people who estimate his resolve
as Mr. Barrett, so his daughter declared, regarded Horne
when he heard of that poet having published "Orion" at a farthing:
"Perhaps he is going to shoot the Queen, and is preparing evidence
of monomania."
With Browning there never could have been two sides to the question:
it were excusable, it were natural even, had his father wavered.
The outcome of their deliberations was that Robert's further education should
be obtained from travel, and intercourse with men and foreign literatures.
By this time the poet was twenty. His youth had been uneventful; in a sense,
more so than his boyhood. His mind, however, was rapidly unfolding,
and great projects were casting a glory about the coming days.
It was in his nineteenth year, I have been told on good authority,
that he became ardently in love with a girl of rare beauty,
a year or two older than himself, but otherwise, possibly,
no inappropriate lover for this wooer. Why and when this early passion
came to a close, or was rudely interrupted, is not known.
What is certain is that it made a deep impression on the poet's mind.
It may be that it, of itself, or wrought to a higher emotion
by his hunger after ideal beauty, was the source of "Pauline",
that very unequal but yet beautiful first fruit of Browning's genius.
It was not till within the last few years that the poet spoke at all freely
of his youthful life. Perhaps the