This brilliant mental quality had its drawback,on which I have already touched in a rather different connection:the obstacle which it created to even serious and private conversation on any subject on which he was not neutral.Feeling,imagination,and the vividness of personal points of view,constantly thwarted the attempt at a dispassionate exchange of ideas.But the balance often righted itself when the excitement of the discussion was at an end;and it would even become apparent that expressions or arguments which he had passed over unheeded,or as it seemed unheard,had stored themselves in his mind and borne fruit there.
I think it is Mr.Sharp who has remarked that Mr.Browning combined impulsiveness of manner with much real reserve.He was habitually reticent where his deeper feelings were concerned;and the impulsiveness and the reticence were both equally rooted in his poetic and human temperament.
The one meant the vital force of his emotions,the other their sensibility.
In a smaller or more prosaic nature they must have modified each other.
But the partial secretiveness had also occasionally its conscious motives,some unselfish,and some self-regarding;and from this point of view it stood in marked apparent antagonism to the more expansive quality.
He never,however,intentionally withheld from others such things as it concerned them to know.His intellectual and religious convictions were open to all who seriously sought them;and if,even on such points,he did not appear communicative,it was because he took more interest in any subject of conversation which did not directly centre in himself.
Setting aside the delicacies which tend to self-concealment,and for which he had been always more or less conspicuous;excepting also the pride which would co-operate with them,all his inclinations were in the direction of truth;there was no quality which he so much loved and admired.
He thought aloud wherever he could trust himself to do so.
Impulse predominated in all the active manifestations of his nature.
The fiery child and the impatient boy had left their traces in the man;and with them the peculiar childlike quality which the man of genius never outgrows,and which,in its mingled waywardness and sweetness,was present in Robert Browning till almost his dying day.
There was also a recurrent touch of hardness,distinct from the comparatively ungenial mood of his earlier years of widowhood;and this,like his reserve,seemed to conflict with his general character,but in reality harmonized with it.It meant,not that feeling was suspended in him,but that it was compressed.It was his natural response to any opposition which his reasonings could not shake nor his will overcome,and which,rightly or not,conveyed to him the sense of being misunderstood.
It reacted in pain for others,but it lay with an aching weight on his own heart,and was thrown off in an upheaval of the pent-up kindliness and affection,the moment their true springs were touched.
The hardening power in his composition,though fugitive and comparatively seldom displayed,was in fact proportioned to his tenderness;and no one who had not seen him in the revulsion from a hard mood,or the regret for it,knew what that tenderness could be.
Underlying all the peculiarities of his nature,its strength and its weakness,its exuberance and its reserves,was the nervous excitability of which I have spoken in an earlier chapter.I have heard him say:
'I am nervous to such a degree that I might fancy I could not enter a drawing-room,if I did not know from long experience that I can do it.'
He did not desire to conceal this fact,nor need others conceal it for him;since it was only calculated to disarm criticism and to strengthen sympathy.
The special vital power which he derived from this organization need not be reaffirmed.It carried also its inevitable disablements.
Its resources were not always under his own control;and he frequently complained of the lack of presence of mind which would seize him on any conventional emergency not included in the daily social routine.In a real one he was never at fault.
He never failed in a sympathetic response or a playful retort;he was always provided with the exact counter requisite in a game of words.
In this respect indeed he had all the powers of the conversationalist;and the perfect ease and grace and geniality of his manner on such occasions,arose probably far more from his innate human and social qualities than from even his familiar intercourse with the world.But he could not extemporize a speech.He could not on the spur of the moment string together the more or less set phrases which an after-dinner oration demands.
All his friends knew this,and spared him the necessity of refusing.
He had once a headache all day,because at a dinner,the night before,a false report had reached him that he was going to be asked to speak.
This alone would have sufficed to prevent him from accepting any public post.
He confesses the disability in a pretty note to Professor Knight,written in reference to a recent meeting of the Wordsworth Society.
19,Warwick Crescent,W.:May 9,'84.
My dear Professor Knight,--I seem ungracious and ungrateful,but am neither;though,now that your festival is over,I wish I could have overcome my scruples and apprehensions.
It is hard to say --when kind people press one to 'just speak for a minute'
--that the business,so easy to almost anybody,is too bewildering for oneself.
Ever truly yours,Robert Browning.
A Rectorial Address need probably not have been extemporized,but it would also have been irksome to him to prepare.
He was not accustomed to uttering himself in prose except within the limits,and under the incitements,of private correspondence.
