THE LABORATORY by Robert Browning

Author:Robert Browning [Browning, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9788027202645
Publisher: Musaicum Press
Published: 2017-08-05T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER V

BROWNING IN LATER LIFE

Table of Contents

Browning’s confidences, what there were of them, immediately after his wife’s death were given to several women-friends; all his life, indeed, he was chiefly intimate with women. The two most intimate of these were his own sister, who remained with him in all his later years, and the sister of his wife, who seven years afterwards passed away in his presence as Elizabeth had done. The other letters, which number only one or two, referring in any personal manner to his bereavement are addressed to Miss Haworth and Isa Blagden. He left Florence and remained for a time with his father and sister near Dinard. Then he returned to London and took up his residence in Warwick Crescent. Naturally enough, the thing for which he now chiefly lived was the education of his son, and it is characteristic of Browning that he was not only a very indulgent father, but an indulgent father of a very conventional type: he had rather the chuckling pride of the city gentleman than the educational gravity of the intellectual.

Browning was now famous, Bells and Pomegranates, Men and Women, Christmas Eve, and Dramatis Personæ had successively glorified his Italian period. But he was already brooding half-unconsciously on more famous things. He has himself left on record a description of the incident out of which grew the whole impulse and plan of his greatest achievement. In a passage marked with all his peculiar sense of material things, all that power of writing of stone or metal or the fabric of drapery, so that we seem to be handling and smelling them, he has described a stall for the selling of odds and ends of every variety of utility and uselessness: —

“picture frames White through the worn gilt, mirror-sconces chipped,

Bronze angel-heads once knobs attached to chests,

(Handled when ancient dames chose forth brocade)

Modern chalk drawings, studies from the nude,

Samples of stone, jet, breccia, porphyry

Polished and rough, sundry amazing busts

In baked earth, (broken, Providence be praised!)

A wreck of tapestry proudly-purposed web

When reds and blues were indeed red and blue,

Now offer’d as a mat to save bare feet

(Since carpets constitute a cruel cost).

Vulgarised Horace for the use of schools,

‘The Life, Death, Miracles of Saint Somebody,

Saint Somebody Else, his Miracles, Death, and Life’ —

With this, one glance at the lettered back of which,

And ‘Stall,’ cried I; a lira made it mine.”

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