The ceremonial publicity attaching to all official proceedings would also have inevitably been a trial to him.He did at one of the Wordsworth Society meetings speak a sentence from the chair,in the absence of the appointed chairman,who had not yet arrived;and when he had received his degree from the University of Edinburgh he was persuaded to say a few words to the assembled students,in which I believe he thanked them for their warm welcome;but such exceptions only proved the rule.
We cannot doubt that the excited stream of talk which sometimes flowed from him was,in the given conditions of mind and imagination,due to a nervous impulse which he could not always restrain;and that the effusiveness of manner with which he greeted alike old friends and new,arose also from a momentary want of self-possession.
We may admit this the more readily that in both cases it was allied to real kindness of intention,above all in the latter,where the fear of seeming cold towards even a friend's friend,strove increasingly with the defective memory for names and faces which were not quite familiar to him.He was also profoundly averse to the idea of posing as a man of superior gifts;having indeed,in regard to social intercourse,as little of the fastidiousness of genius as of its bohemianism.He,therefore,made it a rule,from the moment he took his place as a celebrity in the London world,to exert himself for the amusement of his fellow-guests at a dinner-table,whether their own mental resources were great or small;and this gave rise to a frequent effort at conversation,which converted itself into a habit,and ended by carrying him away.
This at least was his own conviction in the matter.The loud voice,which so many persons must have learned to think habitual with him,bore also traces of this half-unconscious nervous stimulation.It was natural to him in anger or excitement,but did not express his gentler or more equable states of feeling;and when he read to others on a subject which moved him,his utterance often subsided into a tremulous softness which left it scarcely audible.
The mental conditions under which his powers of sympathy were exercised imposed no limits on his spontaneous human kindness.
This characteristic benevolence,or power of love,is not fully represented in Mr.Browning's works;it is certainly not prominent in those of the later period,during which it found the widest scope in his life;but he has in some sense given its measure in what was intended as an illustration of the opposite quality.He tells us,in 'Fifine at the Fair',that while the best strength of women is to be found in their love,the best product of a man is only yielded to hate.
It is the 'indignant wine'which has been wrung from the grape plant by its external mutilation.He could depict it dramatically in more malignant forms of emotion;but he could only think of it personally as the reaction of a nobler feeling which has been gratuitously outraged or repressed.
He more directly,and still more truly,described himself when he said at about the same time,'I have never at any period of my life been deaf to an appeal made to me in the name of love.'
He was referring to an experience of many years before,in which he had even yielded his better judgment to such an appeal;and it was love in the larger sense for which the concession had been claimed.
It was impossible that so genuine a poet,and so real a man,should be otherwise than sensitive to the varied forms of feminine attraction.
He avowedly preferred the society of women to that of men;they were,as I have already said,his habitual confidants,and,evidently,his most frequent correspondents;and though he could have dispensed with woman friends as he dispensed with many other things --though he most often won them without knowing it --his frank interest in their sex,and the often caressing kindness of manner in which it was revealed,might justly be interpreted by individual women into a conscious appeal to their sympathy.It was therefore doubly remarkable that on the ground of benevolence,he scarcely discriminated between the claim on him of a woman,and that of a man;and his attitude towards women was in this respect so distinctive as to merit some words of notice.
It was large,generous,and unconventional;but,for that very reason,it was not,in the received sense of the word,chivalrous.
