1873-1878
London Life --Love of Music --Miss Egerton-Smith --Periodical Nervous Exhaustion --Mers;'Aristophanes'Apology'--'Agamemnon'--'The Inn Album'--'Pacchiarotto and other Poems'--Visits to Oxford and Cambridge --Letters to Mrs.Fitz-Gerald --St.Andrews;Letter from Professor Knight --In the Savoyard Mountains --Death of Miss Egerton-Smith --'La Saisiaz';'The Two Poets of Croisic'--Selections from his Works.
The period on which we have now entered,covering roughly the ten or twelve years which followed the publication of 'The Ring and the Book',was the fullest in Mr.Browning's life;it was that in which the varied claims made by it on his moral,and above all his physical energies,found in him the fullest power of response.
He could rise early and go to bed late --this,however,never from choice;and occupy every hour of the day with work or pleasure,in a manner which his friends recalled regretfully in later years,when of two or three engagements which ought to have divided his afternoon,a single one --perhaps only the most formally pressing --could be fulfilled.
Soon after his final return to England,while he still lived in comparative seclusion,certain habits of friendly intercourse,often superficial,but always binding,had rooted themselves in his life.
London society,as I have also implied,opened itself to him in ever-widening circles,or,as it would be truer to say,drew him more and more deeply into its whirl;and even before the mellowing kindness of his nature had infused warmth into the least substantial of his social relations,the imaginative curiosity of the poet --for a while the natural ambition of the man --found satisfaction in it.
For a short time,indeed,he entered into the fashionable routine of country-house visiting.Besides the instances I have already given,and many others which I may have forgotten,he was heard of,during the earlier part of this decade,as the guest of Lord Carnarvon at Highclere Castle,of Lord Shrewsbury at Alton Towers,of Lord Brownlow and his mother,Lady Marian Alford,at Belton and Ashridge.
Somewhat later,he stayed with Mr.and Lady Alice Gaisford at a house they temporarily occupied on the Sussex downs;with Mr.Cholmondeley at Condover,and,much more recently,at Aynhoe Park with Mr.and Mrs.Cartwright.Kind and pressing,and in themselves very tempting invitations of this nature came to him until the end of his life;but he very soon made a practice of declining them,because their acceptance could only renew for him the fatigues of the London season,while the tantalizing beauty and repose of the country lay before his eyes;but such visits,while they continued,were one of the necessary social experiences which brought their grist to his mill.
And now,in addition to the large social tribute which he received,and had to pay,he was drinking in all the enjoyment,and incurring all the fatigue which the London musical world could create for him.
In Italy he had found the natural home of the other arts.The one poem,'Old Pictures in Florence',is sufficiently eloquent of long communion with the old masters and their works;and if his history in Florence and Rome had been written in his own letters instead of those of his wife,they must have held many reminiscences of galleries and studios,and of the places in which pictures are bought and sold.
But his love for music was as certainly starved as the delight in painting and sculpture was nourished;and it had now grown into a passion,from the indulgence of which he derived,as he always declared,some of the most beneficent influences of his life.It would be scarcely an exaggeration to say that he attended every important concert of the season,whether isolated or given in a course.There was no engagement possible or actual,which did not yield to the discovery of its clashing with the day and hour fixed for one of these.His frequent companion on such occasions was Miss Egerton-Smith.
Miss Smith became only known to Mr.Browning's general acquaintance through the dedicatory 'A.E.S.'of 'La Saisiaz';but she was,at the time of her death,one of his oldest women friends.
He first met her as a young woman in Florence when she was visiting there;and the love for and proficiency in music soon asserted itself as a bond of sympathy between them.They did not,however,see much of each other till he had finally left Italy,and she also had made her home in London.She there led a secluded life,although free from family ties,and enjoying a large income derived from the ownership of an important provincial paper.
Mr.Browning was one of the very few persons whose society she cared to cultivate;and for many years the common musical interest took the practical,and for both of them convenient form,of their going to concerts together.After her death,in the autumn of 1877,he almost mechanically renounced all the musical entertainments to which she had so regularly accompanied him.The special motive and special facility were gone --she had been wont to call for him in her carriage;the habit was broken;there would have been first pain,and afterwards an unwelcome exertion in renewing it.Time was also beginning to sap his strength,while society,and perhaps friendship,were making increasing claims upon it.It may have been for this same reason that music after a time seemed to pass out of his life altogether.
Yet its almost sudden eclipse was striking in the case of one who not only had been so deeply susceptible to its emotional influences,so conversant with its scientific construction and its multitudinous forms,but who was acknowledged as 'musical'by those who best knew the subtle and complex meaning of that often misused term.
Mr.Browning could do all that I have said during the period through which we are now following him;but he could not quite do it with impunity.
