href="#fb3_img_img_eca063d9-7104-5658-9219-2de80dc3e308.jpg" alt="Elizabeth Barrett Browning"/>
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
From a drawing made by Field Talfourd, in Rome, 1855
The family friendship with Carlyle was a source of great pleasure to Mrs. Browning, the poet’s mother, and there is on record a night when Carlyle and his brother dined with the Brownings at Hatcham. Another family friend and habitué was the Rev. Archer Gurney, who at a later time became Chaplain to the British Embassy in Paris. Mr. Gurney was a writer of poems and plays, lyrics and dramatic verse, and a volume of his work entitled “Fra Cipollo and Other Poems” was published, from which Browning drew his motto for “Colombe’s Birthday.” Mr. Gurney was deeply interested in young Browning’s poetry, and there is a nebulous trace of his having something to do with the publication of “Bells and Pomegranates.” Another friend of the poet was Christopher Dowson, who married the sister of Alfred Domett; at their homes, Albion Terrace, and their summer cottage in Epping Forest, Browning was a frequent visitor. Dowson died early; but Field Talfourd (a brother of the author of “Ion” and the artist who made those crayon portraits of Browning and his wife, in the winter of 1859, in Rome), Joseph Arnould, and Alfred Domett, with one or two other young men, comprised the poet’s more intimate circle at this time. Arnould and Domett were both studying for the Bar; Arnould had gained the Newdigate in 1834, and had won great applause by his recital (in the Sheldonian Theater) of his “Hospice of St. Bernard.” Later he was offered the editorship of the Daily News, founded by Forster and Dickens, but he kept true to his legal studies and in time became the Judge of the High Court at Bombay, and was knighted by the Crown.
There was a dinner given by Macready at which Browning, Carlyle, and Miss Martineau were guests, and later a dinner at the Carlyles’ where Browning met a son of Burns “who sang some of his father’s songs.” To a friend Browning wrote: “I dined with dear Carlyle and his wife (catch me calling people ‘dear’ in a hurry) yesterday. I don’t know any people like them.”
Browning passed a day with Miss Martineau at Ascot, and again visited her in Elstree, where she was staying with the Macreadys. She greatly admired “Paracelsus,” and spoke of her first acquaintance with his poetry as a “wonderful event.” He dined with her at her home in Westminster, and there met John Robertson, the assistant editor of the Westminster Review, to which Miss Martineau was a valued contributor. Henry Chorley, a musical critic of the day, was another guest that night, and soon after Browning dined with him “in his bachellor abode,” the other guests being Arnould, Domett, and Bryan Proctor; later, at a musicale given by Chorley, Browning met Charlotte Cushman and Adelaide Kemble. Chorley drew around him the best musicians of the time: Mendelssohn, Moscheles, Liszt, David, and other great composers were often rendered in his chambers. Proctor was then living in Harley Street, and his house was a center for the literary folk of the day.
George Eliot speaks of the indifference with which we gaze at our unintroduced neighbor, “while Destiny stands by, sarcastic, with our dramatis personæ folded in her hands.” It was such an hour of destiny as this when, at a dinner given by Sergeant Talfourd, at his home (No. 56) in Russell Square, Browning first met John Kenyon. Our great events mostly come to us like gods in disguise, and this evening was no exception. Unknown and undreamed of, the young poet had come to one of those partings of the ways which are only recognized in the perspective of time. Browning’s life had been curiously free from any romance beyond that with the muses. The one woman with whom he had seemed most intimate, Miss Fanny Haworth, was eleven years his senior, and their intercourse, both conversationally and in letters, had been as impersonal as literature itself. She was a writer of stories and verse, and had celebrated her young friend in two sonnets. This friendship was one of literary attractions alone, and the poet had apparently devoted all his romance to poetry rather than demanded it in life. But now, golden doors were to open.
At this dinner at Mr. Talfourd’s, John Kenyon came over to the poet, after they had left the dining-room, and inquired if he were not the son of his old school-fellow, Robert Browning. Finding this surmise to be true, he became greatly attached to him. Mr. Kenyon had lost his wife some time previously; he had no children, and he was a prominent and favorite figure in London society. Southey said of Kenyon that he was “one of the best and pleasantest of men, whom every one likes better the longer he is known,” and Kenyon, declaring that Browning “deserved to be a poet, being one in heart and life,” offered to him his “best and most precious gift,”—that of an introduction to his second cousin, Elizabeth Barrett.
This was the first intimation of Destiny, but the meeting was still to remain in the future. “Sordello” was published in 1840,—“a colossal derelict on the ocean of poetry,” as William Sharp terms it. The impenetrable nature of the intricacies of the work has been the theme of many anecdotes. Tennyson declared that there were only two lines in it—the opening and the closing ones—which he understood, and “they are both lies,” he feelingly added. Douglas Jerrold tackled it when he was just recovering from an illness, and despairingly set down his inability to comprehend it to the probability that his mind was impaired by disease; and thrusting the book into the hands of his wife he entreated her to read it at once. He watched her breathlessly, and when she exclaimed, “I don’t know what this means; it is gibberish,” Jerrold exclaimed, “Thank God, I am not an idiot.”
Still another edifying testimony to the general inability to understand “Sordello” is given by a French critic, Odysse Barot, who quotes a passage where the poet says, “God gave man two faculties,” and adds, “I wish while He was about it (pendant qu’il était en train) God had supplied another—namely, the power of understanding Mr. Browning.”
Mrs. Carlyle declared that she read “Sordello” attentively twice, but was unable to discover whether the title referred to “a man, a city, or a tree”; yet most readers of this poem will be able to recognize that Sordello was a singer of the thirteenth century, whose fame suddenly lures him from the safety of solitude to the perils of society in Mantua, after which “immersion in worldliness” he again seeks seclusion, and partially recovers himself. The motif of the poem recalls the truth expressed in the lines:
“Who loves the music of the spheres
And lives on earth, must close his ears
To many voices that he hears.”
Suddenly a dazzling political career opens before Sordello; he is discovered to be—not a nameless minstrel, but the son of the great Ghibelline chief, Salinguerra; more marvelous still, he is loved by Palma, in her youthful beauty and fascination; and the crucial question comes, as in some form it must come to every life, whether he shall choose all the kingdoms of power and glory, or that kingdom which is not of earth, and cometh not with observation.
It is easy to realize how such a problem would appeal to Robert Browning. Notwithstanding the traditional “obscurity” of “Sordello,” it offers to the thoughtful reader a field of richest and most entrancing suggestion.
To Alfred Domett, under date of May 22, 1842, Browning writes:[1]
“... I cannot well say nothing of my constant thoughts of you, most pleasant remembrances of you, earnest desires for you. I have a notion you will come back some bright morning a dozen years hence and find me just gone—to heaven, or Timbuctoo! I give way to this fancy, for it lets me write what, I dare say, I have written niggardly enough, of my real love for you, better love than I had supposed I was fit for.... I have read your poems; you can do anything, and I should think would do much. I will if I live. At present, if I stand on head or heels I don’t know; what men require I know as little; and of what they are in possession I know not.... With this I send you your ‘Sordello.’ I suppose, I am sure, indeed, that the translation from Dante, on the fly-leaf, is your own....”
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