But he died of no acute disease,more than seven years younger than his father,having long carried with him external marks of age from which his father remained exempt.Till towards the age of forty he suffered from attacks of sore-throat,not frequent,but of an angry kind.
He was constantly troubled by imperfect action of the liver,though no doctor pronounced the evil serious.I have spoken of this in reference to his complexion.During the last twenty years,if not for longer,he rarely spent a winter without a suffocating cold and cough;within the last five,asthmatic symptoms established themselves;and when he sank under what was perhaps his first real attack of bronchitis it was not because the attack was very severe,but because the heart was exhausted.The circumstances of his death recalled that of his mother;and we might carry the sad analogy still farther in his increasing pallor,and the slow and not strong pulse which always characterized him.
This would perhaps be a mistake.It is difficult to reconcile any idea of bloodlessness with the bounding vitality of his younger body and mind.
Any symptom of organic disease could scarcely,in his case,have been overlooked.But so much is certain:he was conscious of what he called a nervousness of nature which neither father nor grandfather could have bequeathed to him.He imputed to this,or,in other words,to an undue physical sensitiveness to mental causes of irritation,his proneness to deranged liver,and the asthmatic conditions which he believed,rightly or wrongly,to be produced by it.
He was perhaps mistaken in some of his inferences,but he was not mistaken in the fact.He had the pleasures as well as the pains of this nervous temperament;its quick response to every congenial stimulus of physical atmosphere,and human contact.It heightened the enjoyment,perhaps exaggerated the consciousness of his physical powers.
It also certainly in his later years led him to overdraw them.
Many persons have believed that he could not live without society;a prolonged seclusion from it would,for obvious reasons,have been unsuited to him.But the excited gaiety which to the last he carried into every social gathering was often primarily the result of a moral and physical effort which his temperament prompted,but his strength could not always justify.Nature avenged herself in recurrent periods of exhaustion,long before the closing stage had set in.
I shall subsequently have occasion to trace this nervous impressibility through various aspects and relations of his life;all I now seek to show is that this healthiest of poets and most real of men was not compounded of elements of pure health,and perhaps never could have been so.
It might sound grotesque to say that only a delicate woman could have been the mother of Robert Browning.The fact remains that of such a one,and no other,he was born;and we may imagine,without being fanciful,that his father's placid intellectual powers required for their transmutation into poetic genius just this infusion of a vital element not only charged with other racial and individual qualities,but physically and morally more nearly allied to pain.Perhaps,even for his happiness as a man,we could not have wished it otherwise.
