Robert Browning's Father --His Position in Life --Comparison between him and his Son --Tenderness towards his Son --Outline of his Habits and Character --His Death --Significant Newspaper Paragraph --Letter of Mr.Locker-Lampson --Robert Browning's Mother --Her Character and Antecedents --Their Influence upon her Son --Nervous Delicacy imparted to both her Children --Its special Evidences in her Son.
It was almost a matter of course that Robert Browning's father should be disinclined for bank work.We are told,and can easily imagine,that he was not so good an official as the grandfather;we know that he did not rise so high,nor draw so large a salary.
But he made the best of his position for his family's sake,and it was at that time both more important and more lucrative than such appointments have since become.Its emoluments could be increased by many honourable means not covered by the regular salary.
The working-day was short,and every additional hour's service well paid.
To be enrolled on the night-watch was also very remunerative;there were enormous perquisites in pens,paper,and sealing-wax.Mr.Browning availed himself of these opportunities of adding to his income,and was thus enabled,with the help of his private means,to gratify his scholarly and artistic tastes,and give his children the benefit of a very liberal education --the one distinct ideal of success in life which such a nature as his could form.Constituted as he was,he probably suffered very little through the paternal unkindness which had forced him into an uncongenial career.Its only palpable result was to make him a more anxiously indulgent parent when his own time came.
Many circumstances conspired to secure to the coming poet a happier childhood and youth than his father had had.His path was to be smoothed not only by natural affection and conscientious care,but by literary and artistic sympathy.The second Mr.Browning differed,in certain respects,as much from the third as from the first.
There were,nevertheless,strong points in which,if he did not resemble,he at least distinctly foreshadowed him;and the genius of the one would lack some possible explanation if we did not recognize in great measure its organized material in the other.Much,indeed,that was genius in the son existed as talent in the father.The moral nature of the younger man diverged from that of the older,though retaining strong points of similarity;but the mental equipments of the two differed far less in themselves than in the different uses to which temperament and circumstances trained them.
The most salient intellectual characteristic of Mr.Browning senior was his passion for reading.In his daughter's words,'he read in season,and out of season;'and he not only read,but remembered.
As a schoolboy,he knew by heart the first book of the 'Iliad',and all the odes of Horace;and it shows how deeply the classical part of his training must have entered into him,that he was wont,in later life,to soothe his little boy to sleep by humming to him an ode of Anacreon.It was one of his amusements at school to organize Homeric combats among the boys,in which the fighting was carried on in the manner of the Greeks and Trojans,and he and his friend Kenyon would arm themselves with swords and shields,and hack at each other lustily,exciting themselves to battle by insulting speeches derived from the Homeric text.
Mr.Browning had also an extraordinary power of versifying,and taught his son from babyhood the words he wished him to remember,by joining them to a grotesque rhyme;the child learned all his Latin declensions in this way.His love of art had been proved by his desire to adopt it as a profession;his talent for it was evidenced by the life and power of the sketches,often caricatures,which fell from his pen or pencil as easily as written words.
Mr.Barrett Browning remembers gaining a very early elementary knowledge of anatomy from comic illustrated rhymes (now in the possession of their old friend,Mrs.Fraser Corkran)through which his grandfather impressed upon him the names and position of the principal bones of the human body.
Even more remarkable than his delight in reading was the manner in which Mr.Browning read.He carried into it all the preciseness of the scholar.
It was his habit when he bought a book --which was generally an old one allowing of this addition --to have some pages of blank paper bound into it.These he filled with notes,chronological tables,or such other supplementary matter as would enhance the interest,or assist the mastering,of its contents;all written in a clear and firm though by no means formal handwriting.More than one book thus treated by him has passed through my hands,leaving in me,it need hardly be said,a stronger impression of the owner's intellectual quality than the acquisition by him of the finest library could have conveyed.
One of the experiences which disgusted him with St.Kitt's was the frustration by its authorities of an attempt he was making to teach a negro boy to read,and the understanding that all such educative action was prohibited.
In his faculties and attainments,as in his pleasures and appreciations,he showed the simplicity and genuineness of a child.He was not only ready to amuse,he could always identify himself with children,his love for whom never failed him in even his latest years.
His more than childlike indifference to pecuniary advantages had been shown in early life.He gave another proof of it after his wife's death,when he declined a proposal,made to him by the Bank of England,to assist in founding one of its branch establishments in Liverpool.
He never indeed,personally,cared for money,except as a means of acquiring old,i.e.rare books,for which he had,as an acquaintance declared,the scent of a hound and the snap of a bulldog.
