His mind was made up on the chief subjects of contemporary thought,and what was novel or controversial in its proceeding had no attraction for him.He would read anything,short of an English novel,to a friend whose eyes required this assistance;but such pleasure as he derived from the act was more often sympathetic than spontaneous,even when he had not,as he often had,selected for it a book which he already knew.In the course of his last decade he devoted himself for a short time to the study of Spanish and Hebrew.
The Spanish dramatists yielded him a fund of new enjoyment;and he delighted in his power of reading Hebrew in its most difficult printed forms.
He also tried,but with less result,to improve his knowledge of German.
His eyesight defied all obstacles of bad paper and ancient type,and there was anxiety as well as pleasure to those about him in his unfailing confidence in its powers.He never wore spectacles,nor had the least consciousness of requiring them.He would read an old closely printed volume by the waning light of a winter afternoon,positively refusing to use a lamp.Indeed his preference of the faintest natural light to the best that could be artificially produced was perhaps the one suggestion of coming change.He used for all purposes a single eye;for the two did not combine in their action,the right serving exclusively for near,the left for distant objects.
This was why in walking he often closed the right eye;while it was indispensable to his comfort in reading,not only that the light should come from the right side,but that the left should be shielded from any luminous object,like the fire,which even at the distance of half the length of a room would strike on his field of vision and confuse the near sight.
His literary interest became increasingly centred on records of the lives of men and women;especially of such men and women as he had known;he was generally curious to see the newly published biographies,though often disappointed by them.He would also read,even for his amusement,good works of French or Italian fiction.
His allegiance to Balzac remained unshaken,though he was conscious of lengthiness when he read him aloud.This author's deep and hence often poetic realism was,I believe,bound up with his own earliest aspirations towards dramatic art.
His manner of reading aloud a story which he already knew was the counterpart of his own method of construction.
He would claim his listener's attention for any apparently unimportant fact which had a part to play in it:he would say:'Listen to this deion:
it will be important.Observe this character:you will see a great deal more of him or her.'We know that in his own work nothing was thrown away;no note was struck which did not add its vibration to the general utterance of the poem;and his habitual generosity towards a fellow-worker prompted him to seek and recognize the same quality,even in productions where it was less conspicuous than in his own.
The patient reading which he required for himself was justified by that which he always demanded for others;and he claimed it less in his own case for his possible intricacies of thought or style,than for that compactness of living structure in which every detail or group of details was essential to the whole,and in a certain sense contained it.He read few things with so much pleasure as an occasional chapter in the Old Testament.
Mr.Browning was a brilliant talker;he was admittedly more a talker than a conversationalist.But this quality had nothing in common with self-assertion or love of display.He had too much respect for the acquirements of other men to wish to impose silence on those who were competent to speak;and he had great pleasure in listening to a discussion on any subject in which he was interested,and on which he was not specially informed.He never willingly monopolized the conversation;but when called upon to take a prominent part in it,either with one person or with several,the flow of remembered knowledge and revived mental experience,combined with the ingenuous eagerness to vindicate some point in dispute would often carry him away;while his hearers,nearly as often,allowed him to proceed from absence of any desire to interrupt him.This great mental fertility had been prepared by the wide reading and thorough assimilation of his early days;and it was only at a later,and in certain respects less vigorous period,that its full bearing could be seen.
His memory for passing occurrences,even such as had impressed him,became very weak;it was so before he had grown really old;and he would urge this fact in deprecation of any want of kindness or sympathy,which a given act of forgetfulness might seem to involve.
He had probably always,in matters touching his own life,the memory of feelings more than that of facts.I think this has been described as a peculiarity of the poet-nature;and though this memory is probably the more tenacious of the two,it is no safe guide to the recovery of facts,still less to that of their order and significance.
Yet up to the last weeks,even the last conscious days of his life,his remembrance of historical incident,his aptness of literary illustration,never failed him.His dinner-table anecdotes supplied,of course,no measure for this spontaneous reproductive power;yet some weight must be given to the number of years during which he could abound in such stories,and attest their constant appropriateness by not repeating them.
